


Reclaiming Gallifrey

by GroovyKat



Series: Gallifrey [2]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 80
Words: 414,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24310702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroovyKat/pseuds/GroovyKat
Summary: A direct continuation of Speaking His Language.    Although finally reunited, the Doctor and Rose struggle to find a mutual footing in their stride toward becoming the happily bonded pair that they once were.  With Braxiatel still AWOL and reeling from his disastrous altercation with Rassilon, Romana faces the fight to reclaim her Presidency from Rassilon without him at her side.  The family is fractured ... and they need to pull it together to reclaim a planet of innocent people from a threat even bigger than the Daleks.
Relationships: Irving Braxiatel & Romana, Irving Braxiatel/Romana (Doctor Who), Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Series: Gallifrey [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1754998
Comments: 1492
Kudos: 328





	1. Rocky Road Ahead

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go ... For those of you who walked straight from Speaking his Language to this one to see what comes next: Welcome aboard, you brave and wonderful peeps. 
> 
> Here's hoping you enjoy where this one takes us. There will be a decent amount of angst in this one ... Fluff will pop up from time to time. Might be some more extending myself beyond my comfort zone bits as well...
> 
> I really, seriously, hope you enjoy this tale. :)

On any other occasion Rose Tyler might take offence to boisterous and drunken shenanigans occurring within eyesight of her two children. Well. Admittedly she had started to take a slight offence to it right now as the volatility of the Moonshine distilled by the Southern Mountaineer’s started to take its toll, but she was loathe to try to put any form of stop to it. These were men and women victoriously celebrating the salvation of their home and the end of a war that had raged on for almost half a millennium. They’d tire out soon enough. As it was, the bulk of the staggering, song singing, slurring drunken Gallifreyans had found a decent spot on the grass, at the kitchen table, or inside a capsule to pass out. The still-sober members of the medical teams were dutifully making the rounds of the unconscious to ensure that all of them were rolled into recovery positions. The war was finally over, and none of them wanted to have to deal with any regenerations or medical emergencies of an alcohol-induced nature…

…although Lord Phiroi had indignantly suggested that if any of them did get themselves in to such a state, then Rassilon be with them – they were on their own. He was ready to shut down operations for his team. Ready to repatriate those men and women who waited in silent stasis in the coolest part of the capsule. Ready for all of them to return home.

It was after his third annoyed rant within an Earth hour about how he hadn’t spent two centuries at the academy learning medicine to have to deal with a bunch of brainless drunken idiots too stupid to partake in their cheer responsibly, Rose hooked her arm through his and dragged him out of the capsule. She navigated him away from an unidentified putrid puddle on the floor and led him into the living room. 

Romana had done her absolute best to clear out as many people as she could, but it was still bustling with excitement and cheer from the more senior members of the outpost. They were much more subdued in their cheer than the celebration beyond her kitchen door. Whiskey was still being freely poured over ice that didn’t want to melt, and wine was on offer, but their conversations fell more toward the more tactical discussions of where they would move from here, rather than simply revelling in the immediate victory.

Rose offered the eight-strong gathering with a smile as she led in her charge. Her eyes scanned the room for an appropriate place to settle the exhausted, frustrated Lord that led the medical team. She spied a space on the cushion beside where the Doctor was seated. Their daughter was slumped on his lap, with her ear against his chest in a sleep deep enough that she remained unconscious despite her father’s excited yapping and gesturing toward a fellow Time Lord seated on an armchair across the coffee table. She gave him a tender smile when he looked up at her with a grin of his own and petted the seat beside him with invitation for her to join them.

Instead of accepting his invitation, she led Phiroi toward the vacant seat. “Sit,” she urged him with a smile and a pet of his shoulders as she pushed him down onto the couch, onto the only available seat left in the room. She kept one hand on his shoulder and cupped his cheek with the other. There was a gentle look in her eyes as she gazed upon his exhausted expression. “If my kitchen is still intact and there aren’t any bodies blocking my way, I’ll put on a pot of tea.”

“That would be very much appreciated,” Phiroi breathed out thankfully. “If it’s not too much bother, of course.”

“Of course not,” she assured him. “Making tea is actually very relaxing for me.” She looked toward the corridor. “It’s the trek to the kitchen that’s the tricky part. Drunken male Gallifreyans are unfortunately very much like drunk blokes here on Earth.” She looked back to him with a smile and a shake of her head. “Very handsy. Lost count of how many slaps I’ve gotten on my backside this afternoon.” Her finger flicked up quickly at a growl from Phiroi’s side. She cast her gaze toward the Doctor and offered him a look of warning. “I can sort them on my own, Doctor. No need for you to get all territorial.”

“Do you need an escort?” he asked with a glare toward the hallway door.

“Not while you’re acting as the bed to our daughter, Doctor,” she answered with a wink. “Stay here. Cuddle with her. Chat with your fellow Time Lords. Enjoy.”

“You haven’t gotten off your feet all day,” he remarked with a pinch in his brow. “I’ve barely seen you.”

She straightened up and gave him a small smile. “Plenty of time for that, yeah? Not planning a trip in the TARDIS any time soon, are you?”

He seemed a little taken aback by that. His brows dropped into a slight frown and he spoke slowly. “Not without _you_ , at any rate.”

“Good to know,” she said more to herself than to him as she stepped away from Phiroi and manoeuvred around the coffee table toward the hallway door. She paused beside where Romana was seated with their orphaned infant asleep on her chest. “Need anything, Romana?”

“Nothing I can ask of you,” she breathed out slowly. “But thank you.”

Rose set her hand on her friend’s shoulder. She gave her a weak smile of understanding. “He’ll come home soon enough. His hearts can’t function without you.”

Romana touched her hand to Rose’s with thanks. “I hope you’re right, Rose. I really do.” She exhaled and looked down to the snuggly little bundle against her chest. “We’re going to need him.”

An elder Lord seated next to the Doctor gave a firm nod of his head in agreement. “Indeed, Lady Romana. We are going to need his ruthlessness on our side if we are to succeed in moving forward.”

Rose lifted her head, her mouth open with understanding. “And this looks to be part of the conversation I don’t need to be part of.” She petted Romana’s shoulder with support. “Not even 24 hours to enjoy the victory, and you’re having to make plans for the next phase of things.”

“Such is the life of a former President,” Romana said with a sigh.

“Who will be President again,” the Lord declared firmly. He looked across at the gathering. “And we do need to move sooner, rather than later. Rassilon will only be distracted by this victory for a short moment.”

Rose leaned down to take the child from Romana’s arms. “I’ll put her to bed for you.” She lifted her eyes to the group as she settled the child against her chest. “You discuss what you need to. I’ll bring back tea and grab Alirra in a moment.” She looked to the Doctor. “You okay with her for a couple more minutes?”

“Yeah,” he drawled out breathily with a tilt of his head at her. “Course I am.”

“Good, be back in a minute.”

He watched her leave with a pinch of concern in his brow. His gaze shifted toward Romana, who had dropped her chair from it’s lounging lean with a flick of the lever and was now brushing off her knees with her fingertips. Her shoulders were forced high and she rolled her head on her neck. Her eyes caught his glance and she shook her head at him. “Rose is exhausted,” she said after a moment. “As we all are. Don’t read too much into her apparent aloofness toward you.”

“Hard not to,” he muttered. “When she seems to comfortable and _not aloof_ toward the rest of you.”

“We’ve been working together for some time now,” Phiroi offered him. “Every waking moment for more than a year in her timeline. The experiences we’ve shared in that time have provided a strong bond of comradery between us.” He wasn’t at all kind nor sensitive toward the situation. “Despite you now taking stand as her mate, you’ve been gone a while. Until the two of you had your rather spectacular argument last evening, she hadn’t seen you for near-on three years.” He looked at him with a shrug. “Makes you a relative newcomer to this group, really.” 

“You really don’t have that good of a bedside manner, do you?” The Doctor growled out. “Insensitivity, thy name is Phiroi.”

“At your age, I wouldn’t expect that I’d have to sugar coat it for you, Lord Doctor,” he answered flatly. “Although if you would prefer, I can certainly pet you on the head, offer you a candy stick, and tell you that it will all be okay, like I would a child.”

“Patronising as well,” he snapped in reply. His eyes slid toward Romana. “These are the types of people that you’ve had living around my wife and children during my absence?”

Her eyes shot up with warning as she sensed scathing comebacks being formed in the minds of others. “If any of you dare to make comment or continue this line of conversation, I will punish the lot of you,” she warned with a curl in her lip. Her eyes shifted to the Doctor. “At a more appropriate time, I expect you’ll have that discussion with your mate. It _won’t_ be discussed amongst those outside of the Lungbarrow family unit.”

“Oh trust me,” he answered flatly. “There will be discussions between the _entire_ Lungbarrow family unit.”

“I expect no less,” she breathed out impatiently. She looked toward the elder of all of the Lords. “Lord Elrald. What can you tell us about Gallifrey’s victory, and just what timeline we expect to safely start to return our refugees and outpost members?”

His brows lifted high and he looked toward the Doctor, who seemed to be more interested in the discussion than his disinterested posture suggested. “The Lord Doctor, I think, is in a better position to explain what led to the victory than I am. The actual details filtering down from the Capitol – at least what’s left of it – are spotty at best. I’ve heard several rather magnificent tales, few of which are in any way believable.”

“I don’t know that you’d necessarily believe _my_ tale,” the Doctor offered. “I barely believe it myself.”

“The one recurring theme is that it took all Thirteen of you to pull it off,” Elrald remarked with a lift in his brows. “Which sounds utterly terrifying for me to consider.”

One side of the Doctor’s mouth curled up into a tight smile of pride, but he said nothing.

Elrald shifted his gaze back to Romana. “As to the safe return of our people…” he shrugged and shook his head lightly. “That’s still uncertain at this juncture. I might recommend temporal coordinates consistent with a forward shift of at least a year in Gallifrey’s current timeline.”

A Time Lady seated on a loveseat toward the rear of the small room lifted her hand in a delicate gesture to be heard. “With apology, Lady President,” she began. “If you don’t mind my interruption. Lady Qantilmiarilan of the Arcalian Chapter.”

Romana gave her a nod. “Please, Lady Qantil, go ahead.”

“Members of my chapter had created models to project and anticipate the damage to the ecosphere and provide an estimated recovery time.” She swallowed and drew in a breath. “Our models show a modest recovery period of ten years to a half century.” She held up her hands in a shrug. “Gallifrey’s surface is completely barren right now. Without a concerted effort to try and revitalise the lands and surfaces, nothing will survive. We’d end up a society living in bubble domes trying to to survive on hydroponic farms.”

“That’s if the waters aren’t contaminated,” the Doctor offered. “Which is unlikely.”

Lady Qantil smiled at him. “Some of our scientists have been working on a solution to that here at the outpost. They are close to a solution.”

The Doctor leaned forward, carefully repositioning Alirra on his lap. There was pure excitement and curiosity in his eyes. “Oh? Really?” His brows flicked eagerly. “I’d love to take a look at your work so far. If I can be of any assistance at all, then please ask.”

“I think I can arrange a meeting between you and my team, Doctor,” she offered with a matching smile. “It’s very exciting…”

“It is,” he agreed. “Very. Think of the possible future applications of a solution of that nature across the rest of the Kasterborous and beyond.” His eyes lifted as he considered the possibilities. “We can help counteract the damage done during the war.” His head shook slowly as a smile stretched across his face. “ _Brilliant_.”

Elrald held up his hand in warning to the Doctor. “I wouldn’t get ahead of yourself, Lord Doctor. Rassilon isn’t going to allow the use of Time Lord technology outside of Gallifrey.”

“Who says I’d be looking for _his_ permission?” He looked back to Qnantil. “I’d definitely love it if you could set me up with a good old thinktank session with your scientists.” He looked to the door. “Are they located here?”

“They are,” she said with a nod. “They were brought to this sanctuary very early on in the war effort, when council cancelled all scientific research in favour of the war effort.”

“Yes, yes,” Erald huffed. “Most exciting, of course, for the scientifically minded among us.” He held up his hand and twirled his finger in the air in a somewhat condescending gesture. “For those of us concerned with real issues, such as the return of our people to their homes, do your models and projections also offer insight and plans for returning almost two hundred thousand people to the surface of Gallifrey without detection – half a century _after_ the war ended?”

“I don’t consider that to be an issue,” she argued with a smile on her face and a voice filled with sugar and honey. “Not when our Lady Romana has her seat back at the head of the Council table.” She looked to Romana. “In fact, I would expect that our Lady President will be at the materialisation pad to welcome them back home.”

Romana’s voice was soft. “While that is the preferred eventuality, we do have to set our plan for the return of our people with the possibility that Rassilon will still be President of Gallifrey,” she said with a sigh. “I can’t allow these capsules to leave this premises and be sent into the vortex if there is any risk at all that it will be Rassilon and his forces at the materialisation pad instead of me.” She passed her gaze around the room. “We all know how Rassilon feels about the outerworlders, and those not designated as Time Lord.”

Elrald agreed. “If Rassilon feels he has the opportunity to rid Gallifrey of the Outerworlders and recreate the planet as a Time Lord only society, then he’ll take it.” He shook his head with disgust. “I have no doubt at all on that.”

“He’s likely to arrange intercept and destruction of the capsules before they even leave the Vortex,” Phiroi offered darkly. “More than 80% of the people here are Gallifreyans without Time Lord designation.” He exhaled. “He’d accept a 20% collateral damage of Time Lords without a second thought about it.”

Elrald leaned back heavily in his chair and crossed his legs at the knee. “Is there any way that Cardinal Braxiatel can use his influence to mask the return of the capsules? He’s good at distraction and interference – such a deliciously deceptive Lord of Council.”

“For the time being,” Romana said with a quiet, yet firm voice. “We have to eliminate Braxiatel from any such plans.”

“For what reason?”

“Reasons that are none of your concern,” she shot back quickly. There was a flare of warning in her glare. “And he will not be brought up again without my permission, am I clear?” She shifted her eyes, noting a look of concern from the Doctor. “I am sure that you agree, Lord Doctor.”

“For the moment, yeah,” he answered. “However, when he chooses to return, I certainly wish you luck in holding him back.” 

“Luck will have nothing to do with it,” she remarked with husk in her tone. “I am as unwilling to allow him to face Rassilon in his current condition as you would be with your own mate.”

“I don’t expect you’ll have much of a choice in it.” He shifted his eyes to Elrald, and then looked back at Romana. “Brax is most dangerous and unreasonable when he’s angry. Right now he’s absolutely furious. Furious _and_ upset. If he hasn’t already rushed back to Gallifrey with Rassilon in his sights, he’s certainly not going to let you or anyone hold him back if you intend on going in yourself.”

“He hasn’t,” she replied. “And he won’t.”

“Are you quite sure of that?”

She thumbed over her shoulder toward where his capsule sat silently in Rose’s hallway. “She’s still here, Doctor. Braxiatel won’t return to Gallifrey without her.”

Elrald narrowed his eyes and looked to Romana with worry. “Just what _condition_ has the Cardinal found himself in that he’s unable to assist?”

“I’d much rather not…”

“No longer Time Lord,” Phiroi answered, overtalking Romana with a shrug. “No longer Cardinal.”

“How in the name of Omega did _that_ happen?”

Phiroi looked toward Romana and jumped just slightly at the aggrieved glare she had on him. He swallowed thickly. “Was that a secret? I didn’t think it was given that he made a rather spectacular scene of it when he came into my medical capsule to check on Lady Rose.”

Romana’s face tightened up into a grimace and she huffed out a breath of complete annoyance. “I expect Rassilon will make an announcement of it shortly. Use him as an example of the power he wields over us all.”

Elrald rolled his eyes and exhaled a disgusted breath. “Well, regardless of what the resurrected fool has ordered, Braxiatel is still Time Lord, and still Cardinal to all of us here.” He looked around at the gathering. “Am I correct?” He heard the sounds of agreement and looked to Romana. “So you’d best be reinstating his titles and his Time Lord status when you resume your role as President. That Lord has done far more for Mother Gallifrey than the idiot current president has done.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Romana stated softly, although there was an appreciative smile on her face. “Rassilon and his current members of council aren’t going to be that easy to usurp from power.” She looked toward Elrald with a deep inhale picking up her chest. “Are our numbers still strong? Do we still have support?”

Another Lady, one that had remained quiet, yet observant, finally joined the conversation. “My Lady President,” she said in a light voice and a cheeky smile. “The numbers that make up the resistance movement have only grown over the past century. Rassilon’s Ultimate Sanction plan really did ruffle a few feathers amongst the non-elite members of the Time Lord society.” Her eyes shifted toward the Doctor, and she did have a little bit of the hopeless expression of a dedicated fan on her face. “And with the Lord Doctor on our side, I can only anticipate a higher number of Lords and Ladies alike wanting to join.” She shuffled forward in her chair and held out her hand to him. “My Lord. We haven’t had the opportunity to meet. I’m Elriaffondichel of the Dromeian Chapter.”

He offered her his brightest smile and shifted forward to take her fingers in his. He dipped his head politely in greeting. “Elriaffondichel, it’s a pleasure.”

“Elria, please,” she offered him shyly.

“A beautiful name,” he offered her. “Statistician for the resistance, then?”

She shrugged. “Numbers,” she said with a sigh and a lift in her shoulders. “What can I say? I love numbers.”

“Oh, me too.”

Rose’s voice filtered in with light amusement as she set a cup of tea in front of Phiroi. “Oh look out,” she breezed softly to Elria. “He’ll be asking you to join him as his TARDIS companion in a minute.” She stepped in between the two, not enough to separate the hold of their hands, but enough to stand in front of the Doctor. She leaned down and wrapped her hands around her daughter’s waist. “Here, let me take her, Doctor. She should be in bed.”

He released Elria’s hand and looked up to Rose with a light tic in his eye. He shifted in his seat and pushed one hand back on the cushion of the couch in a manner to suggest he was going to stand. “Let me help you,” he offered.

“It’s okay,” she assured him with a shake of her head as she drew Alirra into her arms. Her young daughter didn’t quite wake, but she stirred enough to turn to her mother and put her arms around her neck in a practiced movement that suggested being pulled from someone’s chest was a rather regular occurrence. She bounced just lightly to settle Alirra’s legs around her hips and offered the Doctor a smile. “I’ve got it. Plenty practiced at this. Aly won’t go down unless she’s listening to her Uncle’s hearts beat under her ear.” She tucked Alirra’s head under her chin and leaned down to retrieve the Flubble Teddybear. “Good thing you showed when you did. Otherwise, I’d be dealing with a temper tantrum of cosmic proportions.”

She looked at the rest of the group with a smile. “I’ll say good night here. It’s been a long day, and I really need some sleep. Please don’t stop your plotting and planning on my account. My house is your house.”

She looked at her little girl snuffling against her collarbone in her sleep and slowly walked up the stairs toward her room. She sang a light whisper of a Gallifreyan lullaby against her hair. She kept singing it softly as she leaned down to pull back the duvet. The soft song turned to a light groan of song as she struggled to maintain her balance and draw back the blanket.

“Let me get that for you,” the Doctor offered at her side with a lean around her to pull back the duvet. He remained at Rose’s side as she gently lay their daughter in her bed and pulled the blankets up to her shoulders.

Rose dropped to place a kiss on her daughter’s temple. She spoke a gentle series of Gallifreyan syllables against her hair and then rose to a stand and watched the Doctor do the same. The words he whispered against his daughter’s hair were slightly different to the ones said by Rose, but they were just as precious. She waited for him to rise back up to his full height and touched him lightly on his arm. “They’re glad to have you home,” she said softly.

He watched his sleeping daughter and let Rose’s words swirl for a second inside his mind. He replayed the rest of the evening in his mind and spoke quietly without looking at her.

“Are you?”

“Of course I am,” she whispered in reply far too quickly for him to take total comfort in her affirmation. He inhaled a breath and held it a moment. “Are you? Glad to be here, I mean.”

He turned to her then, looking at her face shadowed in the darkness of the room. He couldn’t read her expression, but he saw that she was looking at Alirra and not him. “It’s all I’ve wanted since the day you left.”

She exhaled lightly through her nose and gave a light nod. Without further words, she turned to walk from the room. He was close behind her, much closer than she was currently comfortable with. She waited in the hallway for him to close the door behind then to just a small crack and then turned to him. There was sadness in her eyes.

“In our case, it was you who left us,” she admitted. “Well. Were _taken_ from us at any rate.” She inhaled deeply. “Semantics, I suppose you’d say.”

“I really wouldn’t,” he corrected her gently. He held off remarking on how her leaving him was her decision, his leaving was something completely out of his control. He had no desire to start a row with her right now – and he knew beyond all doubt it would start one. She didn’t exactly appear to be in quite the euphoric condition that he had expected her to be when he returned. If anything, she appeared almost numb to it…

“I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” she interrupted his thoughts. At his look of surprise, she tapped her temple. “You’re a bit out of practice in shielding,” she advised him. “Not used to the marriage bond and how much it reveals.” Her eyes lifted. “Been more than four hundred and fifty years since you were held to one of these.” Her eyes fell back to him. “Where I’ve been bound by it since the day we forged it.”

“And you’re shielding?”

She shrugged. “Had to, really. The pain of the tear, it was …” she exhaled with a shudder. “Brax taught me how to suppress it. Suppose it’s instinct now to keep myself shielded. Takes more effort now to drop the shields than to hold them up.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” he pleaded softly. “It would help me know how you feel.” He held out his arms either side of him. “I’m trying to sense it, to know how you feel right now, but Rose. I’m floundering here.”

She looked at him. “Yes, Doctor,” she said with a slight waver in her voice. “I _am_ happy that you’re home. For them…” She looked at the children’s bedroom doors, and then back to him. “And for me.”

He stepped toward her with a somewhat timid forward movement and touched his hands to her waist. She flinched just slightly at his touch, and immediately he snapped his hands away. “When my touch makes you do that,” he said sadly. “I struggle to believe it.”

She sniffed wetly against the butt of her hand and swallowed thickly as she looked upward. It was clear to him that she was fighting off tears. After a moment of obviously thinking about what to say next, she lowered her head. “I’m just scared right now, Doctor,” she admitted. “And I don’t even know why. All I’ve wanted is for you to come home to us. And now that you have…” She looked at him and let a tear fall from her lashes. “I don’t know what do to.”

“Need to sleep on it, I suppose,” he croaked out as helpfully as he could.

“Yeah,” she drawled on a whisper. “Think it might be a good idea. Much as I want to rip all your clothes off, throw you on the bed and make up for lost time…”

“I really don’t see anything wrong with that particular course of action,” he ventured with a cheeky smile and a waggle in his brow in the hope to draw a smile from her.

She gave him a smile and a roll in her eyes. “Tempting.” 

“I’m right here,” he offered her. “Yours for the taking.”

Her amused expression shifted back to pain and she let out a breath. “I really don’t think I’m ready for it right now,” she admitted. She circled her finger around her ear. “There’s still so much goin’ on up here. I’ve still got questions, Doctor. So many of them.” 

“You’ll let me help you answer them, yeah?” he asked her with a pinch in one brow. “You won’t try and struggle through it alone.”

She smiled weakly and gave him a nod. “Yeah.” Her eyes drifted to the stairs. “You can park the TARDIS next to Brax’s capsule. Probably the only spot left to park yet another time ship in my house.” She let out a quiet laugh. “Best you get Romana to set the coordinates the first time and set it on, like a speed dial or something in the old girl. With your piloting skills, we might not see you for the next year, then another year, then another one after that.”

He couldn’t even halfway laugh at that. “I’m not planning on going anywhere, if that’s what you’re worrying about,” he vowed as he set his hands on her hips again. Thankful when she didn’t flinch this time. Boldened to move closer when she lightly curled her hands around his arms, he stepped closer to her. He lightly dipped his head, moving in close so that his whispered words puffed out against her lips. “Stuck with me, Rose. That’s not so bad, yeah?”

Her hands tightened around his biceps, holding him back from closing the distance between them. “I – I’m going to bed,” she managed to say in a voice that showed confidence in her decision. “Let’s talk in the morning when I … when I’ve slept on it.” Her eyes lifted to his. He hadn’t yet moved from the position of nearing to kiss her. “That okay?”

“Yeah,” he drawled on little more than a whisper. “Just. First. Come here.” He slid his arms around her waist and pulled her in for a quick hug. He tucked her head underneath his chin and looked through wide eyes, to scared to let them blink closed and maybe release a teeny tiny tear that he knew was gathering strength in the corner of his eye. “I’ll still be here when you wake, Rose. I promise you that.”

She chuckled against his chest. “With plotting and planning and evil governments to overthrow, Doctor? I don’t imagine they’d be able to get rid of you.”

“It’s a minor incentive, I suppose,” he said with a sniff and a shrug when she pulled out of his arms and petted her hands on his chest, one set of fingers against each of his hearts. He brought his hands up to hold her hands flat against his chest. “They’re still yours. They still beat for you. Like they always have.”

She rolled up onto her toes and kissed his cheek. “I love you too, Doctor.” She stepped back, her hands still on his hearts. Slowly she pulled back her hands and held one at her chest and used the other to open her bedroom door. “My heart – inferior though it may be compared to the Time Lord one – beats for you. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Rose,” he replied softly when she disappeared around the door and closed it behind her. “It’s the Time Lord one that’s inferior,” he breathed to the door. He walked forward and pressed his forehead against the wood, letting out a solemn sigh. “So much so they had to give us two of them.”

He remained in a lean against the door for a few moments, just contemplating the brief conversation they’d had, and fearing the one that would come the following morning. He had to exhale his worries. Whatever path tomorrow took them, he’d handle it. If Rose needed time, he’d give her that time…

…And if really wanted to be honest with himself. He didn’t know if he was quite ready for it himself. He said as much to Donna a little over a day ago. He and Rose – they had a bit to work through together before they could steamroll themselves back into complete marital bliss.

His mind snapped toward a low-toned argument taking place downstairs. Oh yes. That’s right. Plotting and planning and evil governments to overthrow… Best he get back to it, then.

~~oooOOOooo~~


	2. Wolf Cub

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose and the Doctor share in something wonderful...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Very Rose and Doctor heavy rollercoaster chapter. 
> 
> Thank you for such a wonderful reception to the first chapter!! Oh, I couldn't wait to get started on the second chapter you had me all excited!
> 
> I hope that you continue to enjoy as we go. This will roll up and down and spin twisty-rolls here and there, so do be warned. 
> 
> This chapter is for those of you who gave me a poke asking about the wolves before I finished Language ... I know, they've been MIA for a bit, haven't they? Weekend here now ... not sure I can pull out a new chapter before Monday... let's see.

~~oooOOOooo~~

The reality of being a parent, and especially a single parent to young children, was that a full night’s sleep was a luxury she could never quite be afforded. In between dreams about Unicorns, wanting a glass of water, thunderstorms, sickness, or just wanting a cuddle, it was a rare night that at least one of her children didn’t crawl into bed beside her and wake her out of whatever wonderful dream she was having. So when the downward pull of the door handle to her room woke her from an admittedly light and unpleasant slumber, Rose simply extended her arm out into the dark space beside her bed with invitation for her child to join her. She could do with a good cuddle herself right now.

“Come here, baby,” she whispered in the darkness. It didn’t matter which of the two children had stepped into her room. She used that moniker with the both of them.

Typically, that invitation would shift slow and careful footsteps into a heavy run toward her. Tonight, it did not. Instead she heard the slow and cautious tikka-tikka of sharp claws on her wooden floor, and then a wet nose nuzzle against her fingertips. She flexed her fingers to scratch lightly at the muzzle of her wolf and then rolled to her side to be able to extend her reach to scratch its head.

“Which one are you, then?” she asked into the darkness. A huff answered her question and she clutched at the thick hair atop her wolf’s head to tug him closer. She spoke his name as she curled her arm around his thick neck. Dry nose against wet nose, Rose looked down his snout and into his almost luminescent eyes. “You’re not one for snuggles, Soliarn,” she said with curiosity in her tone. “What’s up?”

He snorted in reply as she inhaled, which gave her lungs a decent hit of Dahrama breath and let out a small sound he’d never made before. It was a humph that rattled and flapped the sides of his mouth mixed with a whimpering growl of some form. His chin remained on the mattress, however, so whatever was the matter wasn’t of a life or death emergency type thing. She shuffled back on her mattress and petted the open space between them. “Come on, then,” she said with a light huff. “Up you get. Just for tonight, mind, and don’t tell the missus, okay? She’s been trying to get mattress space for a long time.” She rolled onto her back and put her forearm across her eyes. “I’m too worn out to fight it tonight.”

Soliarn did give a humph and lift himself to lay his front legs along the mattress, but he made no further attempt to pull himself up completely. Instead he gave her another huff.

“I’m not pulling you up,” she warned flatly. “Hundred an’ fourty pounds of heaviness, you are. All teeth and sharp claws if I pull at you wrong. You’re on your own.”

He inched forward and nipped at the sleeve of her night-shirt. He gave a light tug of it as he exhaled a snort through his nose. His tugging got slightly more urgent, and so with a groan, Rose pulled her shirt from his teeth dragged herself across the mattress. She dropped her feet onto the cold wood and slouched a little as she willed herself the strength and wakefulness to make it to a stand without falling into an uncoordinated heap. “I swear, Soliarn,” she said in a strained voice that ended with a yawn. “If this is all about you wantin’ food, I’m going to kill you.” She rocked forward to lever herself off the mattress and rose to a stand, stretching before following him to the door. “Tiallu’s got me and the kids. She can handle bein’ a single parent.”

Soliarn padded toward the door, only turning his head back to her to give her a command for her to hurry up. At least that’s how Rose took the sound he made. She waved her hand at him as her feet found her slippers, and then walked toward the door, snatching her short robe from the hook of the door…

…There were Time Lords downstairs. Lots of them. She didn’t think it wholly appropriate for her to start parading around in nothing but a tiny pair of sleep shorts that barely covered her bottom and camisole set. She did that once, too sleepy to have thought better of it … and walked into a kitchen meeting of resistance members all seated around her dining table. God, but she didn’t think that Brax would ever recover from the horror of it. She’d never seen the man move so fast before, nor had she seen it since. He had the entire contents of the tabletop in the air, against the wall, over the floor, against the kitchen window as he snatched the tablecloth and leapt across it to cover her up. He had her wrapped her up tightly in a cocoon of a now very wet cotton-crocheted table cloth – which admittedly covered very little of her – and a tight circle of his arms before his feet even hit the floor. He barked out orders to all of them at the table to put in a memory block of her _nakedness_ and shuffled her out of the room.

The next day he gifted her with what was quite possibly the most horrendous-looking floor to neck terry towelling bathrobe in a garish hot pink and green colour combination and demanded that in the future if she wished to parade around the house at night in her under-things, then she should cover up…

…Romana quickly replaced it with a much less grandma-style, much silkier robe in a magnificent deep red colour. Which was the one she pulled onto her shoulders now. It only went as far as her knees, and she didn’t bother to tie it closed. The very tips of the long silken sash dragged along the floor at her side. Long enough to tickle at the tips of her feet, but not enough to trip her up.

She covered a yawn with the back of a hand and used the other hand as her support on the stairwell rail as she descended quietly down into the hallway.

Unexpectedly, there was no conversation still being held in her living room. She could see the shifting light from the TV and hear the muted voices of the late-night infomercial stars trying to sell their wares. But sounds of plotting and planning of Time Lords and Ladies in her living room was now absent. Perhaps it was later into the evening than she thought, and they’d all called it quits and headed off to their respective residence capsules. That gave her a breath of relief. Last thing she needed was to show up to their meeting with bedhead hair and racoon eyes. She breathed into her palm and screwed up her nose as she took a quick sniff … and morning breath that was slightly worse than normal as she’d not brushed her teeth the night before.

Soliarn huffed impatiently at the door to the living room, and Rose gave him a wave. “Yeah. Yeah. Coming, love.”

She followed her wolf into the living room and was led toward the large cushioned wolf-bed that had quite recently driven a rather drunk Irving Braxiatel into a state of frustration as he tried to put it together for her. Quite likely he was sober when he started and it was the frustration of reading an IKEA instruction sheet that drove him to start drinking in the first place. It took him two full bottles of red to get to the end of the project, and when he did reach victory against the evils of IKEA, promptly passed out on it.

She still smiled at the image of him all dishevelled and in a messy, smelly, lanky heap on the wolf’s bed with an empty bottle of red still clutched in his hand. She had a photograph of it framed on the wall upstairs. Romana had one of the same hanging in her capsule.

Of course, right at this juncture, the image on the bed was not of old Brax in an inebriated slumber. Her female Dahrama was laid on her side and stretched across it. Her head was awkwardly twisted so that her chin was on the mattress, and she huffed out panted breaths through her closed jaw that flapped her lips in a noisy manner.

“Oh, Sweetheart,” Rose breathed out with understanding as she made a quick approach and dropped onto her knees in front of the bed. She petted Tiallu’s head tenderly. “It’s time, is it?” A quick glance at the wolf’s belly, and the sudden shift of it that contracted the wolf’s entire body confirmed her suspicions. Soliarn’s head shifted onto her knee, and his piercing eyes looked up at her with helplessness as he let out a short whimper. Rose petted his head. “Not feeling quite so ready for this, then, dear?”

He whimpered and nuzzled at his mate’s rear paw.

“Yeah, don’t think any of us really are,” she admitted. “I certainly wasn’t my first time round. Still wasn’t ready when Alirra came along.” She petted his head and scratched behind his ears. “But you know what? We get through it, yeah? And you and her, you’ll rock this parenting thing.” She scratched at her hair when Tiallu let out a pained whimper. “But first things first, we gotto get your precious lady through this.” She looked up to the hallway toward the kitchen door. “Maybe I should go grab one of the specialists to help out.” She looked down at Soliarn. “What do you think? Hmmmmm? Noone’s ever seen a live Dahrama birth, this’ll blow their minds.”

Soliarn gave her a short look of annoyance at that.

“Okay. No witnesses. Got it, papa.” She leaned down to his ear. “But despite squeezing a couple out, myself, I really don’t know what I’m doing.”

She heard a rough and broken snore from behind and twisted her shoulders to investigate. The image she saw sprawled out across her couch had her slowly draw herself to a stand and make a very wary approach.

Her angle of view toward the couch was such that she really couldn’t quite make out the identity of who’d chosen to sleep there. All she could see was a light blue Oxford shirt pushed up to the wearer’s elbows hanging up and over the edge of the arm rest. Tousled chestnut brown hair peeked through the gap of the arm and the back of the couch. On the floor were a pair of dirty white Chuck Taylor runners set in no particular neatness or order. They seemed to have been pulled off with both hands up near his chest and just dropped off to one side rather than toed off and left as a relatively neat paired-off set. Obviously, he’d climbed onto his chosen bed for the night with his shoes on, and then belatedly realised they needed to come off when he was too damn tired to bother sitting up properly to do it.

“Oh, Doctor,” she breathed out apologetically when she walked around the coffee table and was able to take his positioning in properly. Bless the poor bloke, he looked uncomfortable. The couch was at least two-feet too short for his tall and lanky form. His knees hung over the opposite arm rest leaving his legs to hang awkwardly in the air off the ground. One of his socked feet had found support of sorts from the ledge of a bookshelf against the wall, but his other was left hopelessly hanging. It would slide along the leather-like fabric of the arm rest, and then before it could fall and drag him off the couch completely, it would snap back up.

She dragged her eyes up his pinstripe-clad legs and across the matching blazer that he’d pulled across his chest like a tiny little blanket. Her brows pulled together in wonder as to why he’d slept on the couch rather than inside his room on the TARDIS. Her eyes flicked to the wall, where she’d told him to park the old girl… But the TARDIS wasn’t there.

Her stomach fell down into her pelvis and she felt immediate guilt. He’d promised her that he wasn’t going anywhere at all tonight. Depending on where he parked that beautiful blue box of his, it meant leaving the house to retrieve it. He was sticking to his vow far more stringently than was typical for him.

“Oh you hopelessly daft man,” she breathed out as she took a seat on the coffee table at his side. She reached forward and lightly shook his shoulder. There wasn’t any way she was going to continue to let him sleep in this position and wake up all sore and achy. He could take her bed tonight instead. In the morning they could discuss better sleeping arrangements than his tall lanky form on a couch made for two and a half people.

“Doctor,” she breathed out in a whisper. “Wake up.”

His eyes shot open and he exhaled a startled gasp. In an obviously confused and sleepy daze, his unfocused eyes looked around at his surroundings. He lifted lightly on a shoulder, his breaths short through his mouth.

“Doctor,” she whispered gently to get his focus on her. “It’s okay. No danger. You’re on my couch.”

His eyes snapped fast to meet hers. They were still unfocussed and full of confusion but cleared somewhat as a lazy smile stretched wide across his face. “Oh,” he breathed out in a slurred and husky voice. “ _This_ dream.” He lifted his hand to cup the back of her head and drew her down to him. “Gods, yes, please.”

Rose’s eyes shot wide in shock when he crushed her lips to his. He inhaled her gasp though his parted lips and claimed her mouth in possibly the messiest, noisiest kiss she’d ever experienced in her life. His body rolled toward her, and his arm flew across her waist. He grunted into her mouth and pulled her up and over him, artfully positioning her so that her legs fell either side of his hips. His hands curled around the very tops of her thighs, his thumb locking into the 90-degree crease at the juncture between her hips and thighs, and held her firm. He gave an upward rise of his hips toward her, only lifting a hand from her thigh to hook around her neck when he felt she was ready to pull away from him.

Rose was quite torn about how to let this play out. Pros and cons flew around her mind, each one pushed one way and another as his tongue worked its rather nimble magic inside her mouth. The rut and press of him against her was stirring her own desperately neglected and unbridled need, and if she didn’t crawl off him in anything less than a second, then this was going to happen. They’d have uncontrolled– and quite frankly brilliant – couch sex, and …

…And she couldn’t let that happen.

She gasped and tore her mouth from his with a hard press of her hands against his shoulders to hold him down. She exhaled a very pathetically disappointed whimper and sigh with a rise of her head to the ceiling. Her breaths drew in and out of her in a hard series of six to try and calm herself and box her hormones away. With a thick swallow she dropped her chin to look back down at him. There was a warning on the tip of her tongue, but the words rolled down the back of her throat at the wide-eyed, yet sultry expression on his face.

“D-Doctor?” 

“Right,” he breathed out quickly with a nod of his head. “Right. Yes.” His eyes lowered to the space in between them. His hands dropped to the front of his trousers and fumbled with the hook and eye that fastened the top. “Straight to it, then. I’m game.”

Rose’s hands dropped quickly to hold at his wrists. “Doctor!” she hissed with a harsh whisper of warning. “What’re you doing? Stop that.”

His hands stilled in their task. He drew in deepened breaths as he let his eyes rise to where her hands held his wrists, then upward over her deeply heaving belly, up her chest, where the opening of her silken gown was unable to hide the squeeze of unholstered breasts in between her arms, hidden only behind a thin scrap of cotton.

Yeah, he couldn’t continue this slow upward trajectory of his gaze much longer. With a deep breath and a writhe in his shoulders, he raked his eyes with a flick upward. He managed to find her eyes and blinked slowly. “This. This isn’t a dream, is it?”

She shook her head and climbed off his hips. She quickly tightened the robe around her with both hands holding it closed; one at her breasts, the other at her hips. “No. Not a dream.”

He let out a long moan of disappointment and rolled heavily onto his side, almost onto his belly. His arm flopped over the edge of the couch and lay across the floor. His face turned into the cushion, which muffled his words when he spoke again. “Thought it felt _too_ real. More than usual at any rate.” 

“Blimey, Doctor,” she breathed out. “You must have been completely out of it to not figure it out.” 

She made a sound that suggested she was about to say something else, and he groaned and shook shook his head in the pillow. “If you wanna have a chat, then you’re going to have to give me a minute to collect myself, first.” A frustrated growl muffled its way through the cushion. 

“You a’right?”

“Yeah. Getting there.”

“So. Ehm. Dream about us like that often?” she asked with as much hope as amusement in her voice as she sat again on the edge of the coffee table.

He lifted a finger of warning but didn’t lift his face from the cushion. “Not allowed to ask me that,” he answered her. He took a breath or two and lifted up onto his elbows on the couch. He was now pretty much completely on his stomach and let one leg hang over the edge of the couch. He lifted his eyes to hers. “But yeah. I do. Nowhere near as often as I’d like to, mind.” He pushed himself up to a proper seat on the couch and hung over both knees in a tired slouch. He covered his face in both palms. “Maybe I’d sleep more often than I do. Not push through the exhaustion until I finally just pass out from it all.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Which mean’s you’re completely shattered,” she said with a sigh of sympathy. “Go on up to bed. You know where my room is.”

He lifted his face from his palms. “Are you sure?” he queried with a quick flick of his eyes to the stairwell. “You want me to share a bed with you?”

She breathed out a sound through an open mouth. “Ahh. Yeah. I won’t be joining you,” she said with apology.

“You’re not sleeping on the couch,” he gruffed out. His eyes shifted to the kitchen. “And not in one of those capsules, either.” He petted the cushion. “I’ll be fine here tonight. Bring the TARDIS round tomorrow, shift in there for now.”

“I’m not sleepin’,” she corrected him.

“You’ve had three hours at best,” he remarked with a narrowing of his eyes. “Nowhere near what you need.”

She nodded and hummed in agreement. “Not saying I’m not knackered, Doctor, but I’ve got a situation I need to deal with, and it’s probably going to take all night.” Her eyes flicked up. “So my bed’s free. Probably still even got that warm spot you would always snaffle from me when I got up to go to the loo.”

“What’s going on?” he questioned with a good hard scratch at his hair with both hands in an attempt to fully and completely rouse himself from the last niggling remnants of sleep. “Something with the children?”

She shook her head. “No. No. Mark, Alirra, and little Clara are still sleeping. Safe and sound knowing their daddy’s home.”

“Clara’s ours?” he questioned with a yawn against the back of his hand. “Thought she was a loomling of Brax and Romana’s by the way she seems so motherly toward her.”

“She’s an orphan of the war,” Rose answered quickly. “I was hoping to adopt her, myself.” She smiled. “But yeah, I think she’s probably going to end up as Romana’s little girl. Brax is already completely besotted by the little one and his mate as a mother, so I don’t see him arguing.”

He hummed to himself. “So. To be clear. You were going to add to our family without checking with me first?” He scratched at his sideburn. “I mean. Yes. Sure. I’ve been away, but a child is a big commitment…”

“A blessing,” she corrected quickly. “And that little one lost everything. So. Yes. If I am able to make that little girl’s life better and give her all the love I give Mark and Aly, then yes. I’m gonna do it. ” She stood up from the table. “And, anyway. It’s not like I could send you a quick text message asking if you intended on returning any time within the next decade or ever and if so, can I get your permission to add another child to our family while you’re swannin’ about getting into mischief and snogging pretty French bints and the such.”

“That’s not fair,” he whispered darkly.

“Accurate, though,” she challenged him. “Let’s ignore all hot pashes you had with anyone who wasn’t me when I was still with you, Doctor. I know about those. I’m curious to know, though, just how many snogs have you had since Crandinia? Got to be more than none, I’d say.” She looked upward. “How many female companions have you had, since? Bet each one of them got a good lip-lock with you at least once during their tenures on the TARDIS.”

“Let’s not start this,” he pleaded with warning in his voice.

“For comparison. How many have _I_ had since you were ripped away from me on Gallifrey three years ago.” She held up her hand with one finger lifted. “One. Just the one. With old war-boy-Theta Sigma.” She sniffed. “And you know what happened when we kissed, Doctor? Do you even remember?”

He blinked at her but said nothing. No, he didn’t remember himself in his warrior form meeting Rose, certainly didn’t remember making out with her. Didn’t think he had it in him, wily old bastard.

“The bond-guard happened,” she said tearfully. “That’s what. Searing hot pain in my head and my belly. God, Doctor. I couldn’t even kiss my own husband, the only man my heart beats for.” She punched her fist down in the air at her hip. “The _only_ man I want that kind of affection from.”

“Rose, I’m sorry,” he breathed out with genuine apology. 

She shifted her arm up and down at her hip, a movement of self-regulation to bring calming to her rising upset. Her nose was filling, as were her eyes. She turned toward her wolves but twisted to talk to him down along her shoulder. “I’ve been solely dedicated to you, and _only_ you, since we first came together, Doctor.” She turned back to the wolves. “Have you?”

He was silent for a moment as he watched her walk toward the bed where her two wolves were quietly laid together. He didn’t really take all that much notice of the slow lift of Tiallu’s head and her whimper with Rose’s arrival. He simply watched Rose shift down onto her hip and the way she nuzzled into the thick fur of the wolf’s head as though needing comfort herself.

“Do you…” He swallowed. “Do you want me to leave?” He asked in a very timid voice.

Rose kept her head down against Tiallu’s, but shifted her face to look toward him. Her eyes were full of sadness. “Is that what you think I’m asking you to do?” she questioned. “Or is it something you think you need to do. Run?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Then neither do I,” she said softly. “I never wanted you to do that.”

He opened his arms with confusion. His voice was a pained sound. “Then what do you want me to do, Rose? I’m here. I’m willing to do what you need me to do.” He inhaled deeply and sharply, but his words were spoken softly along his exhale. “Just tell me.”

“You have his memories?” she questioned with a pet at Tiallu’s shoulder and a light kiss on her snout. She looked back to him. “His memories of when we met. On Gallifrey.”

“ _My_ memories,” he corrected her. “Same man, remember.”

She nodded slowly. “ _Your_ memories then. Do you have them?”

He drew in a breath and closed his eyes, reaching inside his mind to call up a memory still not quite at the forefront of his mind, but tucked away in wait to be accessed. The library came to mind, and the image of her in front of the old couch in a terrifically devastated state. He didn’t exhale, only inhaled deeper. His voice was tight and very strangled. “Yep. I do.”

“Then that’s what I want from you,” she said without looking at him. “I want you to remember. All of it. Every conversation I had with you back then. I want you to _understand_.” She supported Tiallu’s head with one hand and massaged her shoulder with a firm pet. “Because, Doctor, I really don’t think you understand what you did to make me leave you in the first place.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “I really don’t. Not at all.”

Rose didn’t really seem to hear his admittance. She seemed much more concerned with the wolf in her arms and providing support to her. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she assured her. “We’ll get you through this, okay? You, me, and Soliarn. We got this.”

The Doctor’s eyes flicked to the wolves. To the one laying in discomfort, the one seated worriedly at her side, and then to Rose, tenderly offering comfort. He stepped forward, rubbing his hands on his trousers, concern for the wolf now rising in his mind. “What’s wrong with her? Is she okay … I mean, well, it’s clear she’s not, but…Can I help?”

Rose lifted her head and looked at the wolf’s belly as she gave it a long stroke of her hand. “She’s in labour with her cub.” She smiled toward the helpless father to be. “Soliarn doesn’t think he can handle it on his own. Dragged me out of bed to beg my support.” He scruffed his head. “Didn’t you, boy? Hmmm? Need your mama at your side for this? Believe me, love, I know the feeling.”

The Doctor’s eyes widened. “A Dahrama live birth?”

“Praying for it at the very least,” Rose answered him. “A kicking, howling, biting ball of white fur. Heaven help us with a pup running around as well.”

He dropped to his knees at her side. His face bore a wide grin of excitement and he pushed up the sleeves of his oxford past his elbows. “this is brilliant,” he half cheered. “Rose. You and me, we’ll be the first to see this, you know that?”

“Oh, I’m not so much concerned if we’re the first or the fiftieth to see this, Doctor,” she answered him. “I’m more concerned about how Tiallu’s going to handle it.”

“Oh, she’ll be brilliant,” he said with a wide smile and a breath of awe. He rubbed his hand over her swollen bump, inhaling with a hiss when it contracted to rock-hard under his hand. “Won’t you, you beautiful creature?” He hiccupped with surprise when Soliarn’s head rested on his thigh and the wolf huffed up at him. His memories of this old lad were that he wasn’t a cuddler at all. Never sought any form of attention, unlike his mate who craved it. He dropped his hand to stroke his head. “Been in this same helpless position as you, old friend,” he said with a smile. “Twice, in fact. Nothing fun about seeing the one your hearts beat for being in this much pain, is there?”

“You remember that?” Rose asked him quietly.

He lifted his hand to stroke the pad of his thumb along her cheek. “Of course I do,” he vowed with a pinch in his brows and a sigh on his breath. “My most prized memories are the births of our children. By the Gods, Rose. You were incredible. Simply breathtaking.” He looked to Soliarn. “Don’t ever fool yourself that it’s us blokes who are the _stronger_ and more _capable_ half of our species, old boy. Compared to them, we’re definitely the inferior ones?”

Rose leaned down to Tiallu’s nuzzle. “I think the lads are trying to get in our favour, Sweetheart.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Rose’s head lay against the Doctor’s shoulder, with her arms loosely held around his waist, as they both seated on the floor in front of the wolf’s bed and watched in awe the damp little wolf cub that suckled hungrily from his mother’s teat. It had taken Tiallu a long few hours of whining, whimpering, and panting to finally birth her little cub, and when the sun finally peeked through the part of the drapes over the windows, the little male cub sloshed into the world with a whimper and a whine. 

After a long moment of proud howling toward a moon he couldn’t see, Soliarn finally joined his mate on the bed. He curled himself around her from behind, resting his head on her shoulder to watch their little one as Tiallu finally slept.

“How dangerous are they?” Rose asked after a moment. “With a young one?”

The Doctor shifted just slightly, moving one of his legs around her so that Rose was now settled in between the part of his legs rather than across them. He settled his chin on her shoulder and held her from behind. “Like most animals, the Dahrama can become extremely volatile when they have a cub.”

“Should I be worried about the kids?” She looked to the kitchen. “To the people here? Should I warn them?”

“Might keep that lot out of your living quarters if you do,” he said with a ghost of a laugh against her ear. “I really can’t say for sure. Their reputation is horrifying, really. But I think these two –” he shifted his chin on her shoulder in a gesture toward the wolves. “I think they’re used to Time Lord presence, and the love and care of their bi-ped family members. So as long as the kids don’t try to poke and play with the cub, they’ll be fine.”

“Then we should talk to the kids when they wake up,” she said with decision in her tone. “Make sure they understand that the new mama and papa need some space with their baby.” She held up her hand to cover off a yawn. She lifted her eyes to look at the time. “Blimey. We’ve been here all night, Doctor.”

“Might be good to get some sleep before the kids wake up, then,” he said with a yawn be covered with the back of her shoulder. “What time do they get up?”

“In about five minutes,” she whimpered with a pained expression on her face. “Oh, Hell. This is going to be a day for us, isn’t it?” She slumped. “Might ask Lord Phiroi if he’s got any of that glorious _keep me awake syrup_ on him. Gonna need it.”

“If he doesn’t, then I can make us some,” he offered. “I’m pretty sure I still have the recipe for it pinned in the med cabinet of the TARDIS.”

“Are you going to bring her here?” she asked him almost warily. 

“The TARDIS?” He nodded against her ear. “Yeah. I’ll move her later this morning. Bring Romana with me to properly input the coordinates as per your earlier instructions. Oh, ye of little faith.”

She gave a low chuckle. “Good idea.”

His hold tightened and he pressed his lips into her shoulder for a moment before lifting his head again to look toward the wolves. “We’ll get through this, Rose. You and me.”

“I know we will,” she said with a sigh. “Just might take a minute, that’s all.”

“Despite how I made you feel back before Crandinia,” he managed with husk in his tone. “I want you to know that you were my entire universe. _Are_ my entire universe. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I made you think otherwise.” His eyes closed when she reached up to circle her arm around his head and she lifted her chin to kiss lightly at his temple. “I know words don’t make up for it right now, but give me a chance to work through it, work it out, and I’ll be the man you need me to be again.”

A cheer from the hallway, the excited voice of their nine year old boy quickly interrupted their quiet interlude.

“Oh look! A puppy!”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	3. Recalled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose is feeling claustrophobic, and Rassilon wants his toys back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Monday, peeps!
> 
> Well I have to admit that this went in a direction I wasn't expecting... I had plans, and had pretty good ones at that. Turns out that Brax is a lot more wily and sneaky than even I gave him credit for... Ugh. 
> 
> Anyhooo.... this is a setup chapter, and we know how I feel about these. Always apprehensive in posting, because I figure you lot would get bored pretty quick, especially after a 2-day break in posting. But now that I've got people where they need to be, we can move on to better things. Particularly excited about tomorrow's chapter, actually... Hope you guys will be.
> 
> I hope that you enjoy!

~~oooOOOooo~~

Things were very definitely beginning to get very cramped in her little home in Chiswick. If losing her kitchen and backyard to travel capsules and refugees wasn’t bad enough, now she’d also lost half of her living room as well.

A week ago, having tired of trying to plot, plan, strategise, and argue on armchairs and couches around her coffee table, Romana had supervised Lord Phiroi and the Doctor in setting up a strategic office post in the front of the living room. They’d positioned a large table beside a bookcase that had been cleared of her choice of novel and was now a filing cabinet of sorts for their own library of texts, folders, schematic drawings and laptop-style computers. 

Her couches and armchairs, once in an array that allowed airy openness and relaxed distanced comfort, was now a U-shaped alcove that cordoned off the strategic office completely from the rest of the room in a half wall of leather cushions. Now only half a living room, entry generally required a twist and turn-style of walking to manoeuvre around and into a seat. Heavens forbid one wanted to get up and move once they’d found position. If there happened to be more than one person seated on the couch in front of the coffee table, then moving required several hushed apologies and side-step movements to get by. It felt more like trying to get down an aisle of a sport stadium than an actual living room.

Watching television during the day was now a non-starter as well. For the first time in almost a year, Rose actually had some downtime and figured she’d catch up on a Netflix series she’d been curious to partake in – A sci-fi hit with time travel and alien adventures. She’d settled in with a cup of tea and a tray of biscuits, picked up her remote and got all of three minutes into the show before she felt the burn of six pairs of Time Lord and Lady eyes boring through the back of the couch and into the back of her head.

As much as she had wanted to turn toward them and give them all a good stare of annoyance and frustration of her own, she knew her look of fury wasn’t able to match the might of six pairs of eyes. So instead, she’d just made do with shutting off the TV with an angry flick of the remote, muttered a good old English swear under her breath and stormed from the room. She spent the remainder of her day in her bedroom, only emerging when she had to do the school run to pick up the kids.

The following day, she woke up to a golden box wrapped in a crimson-red ribbon on her coffee table. Inside was a large computer tablet, a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and gift cards for subscriptions to every single streaming service offered in the UK. There was a card inside that said “sorry” in about thirteen different languages, signed by each member of the group. In a fit of absolute juvenile petulance, however, she stared over the edge of the couch at the table of Lords and Ladies as she handed the headphones to Soliarn and told him he had a new chew toy.

“You’re a technologically advanced species,” she charged them. “Maybe _you_ should all wear headphones and mics.” 

It surprised her when the Doctor agreed with her suggestion. Made sense to him, he figured, and pretty quickly he’d subverted the discussion toward pulling together something of that nature.

Hadn’t happened, of course. If she was being honest, she hadn’t really expected it to.

So, she’d merely made adaptations to yet another new normal inside her home. What these Lords and Ladies were doing was important to the safety of their people. She could continue to make accommodations for them if it meant they would succeed and everyone – all of them – could return home…

…But if one of them dared to ask her to fix them a pot of tea or a plate of nibbles, she’d tell them to sod off and fend for themselves.

Today was yet another day of finding room to get her basic domestic tasks done. With a laundry basket of freshly dried clothing at her hip, she eyeballed the living room arrangements and determined a plan of attack. If she sat at the centre of the couch and plopped the basket in between her ankles, then she could fold into piles on the coffee table and the cushions either side of her. Then she could set the folded clothes back into the basket and make the rounds to deliver the clothes to their appropriate draws.

With that plan set, she carefully manoeuvred herself into place and squeezed the basket to set it on the floor. She popped in her airpods, put her housework playlist on her iphone, and bobbed along to the music. She mouthed the lyrics rather than singing along and mindlessly folded boxer briefs in a pair of sizes, undershirts, and tiny little dresses and onesies.

She was into her third song, and her fourth pair of deep-red coloured boxers briefs when she felt tickling fingers at her ears and the airpods popped free.

“What?” she queried with a faux huff as arms shifted down over her shoulders and a pair of lips grazed at the shell of her ear. “Is my folding laundry too loud for you guys, now?”

The Doctor sighed against her ear. “I’m sorry, Rose,” he offered. “I know this is inconvenient…”

“Not like I’m not used to it,” she replied with a sigh of her own as she stopped the fold of a pair of boxers and held the fabric in her lap. She looked toward the kitchen, and to the shadows of people moving around behind the frosted glass. “Been my life for a while now.”

“I’ll speak to them about finding another location,” he offered as he climbed up over the back of the couch and slid his pinstriped butt down the back cushion to sit next to her. He managed to push off a small pile of folded laundry that Rose had put beside her onto the floor and winced apologetically. “Before you yell at me for doing that, I’ll fix it.”

“Wasn’t going to yell,” she breathed out. “Not like I don’t have two kids and two wolves that routinely do the same thing you just did.” She shrugged. “Just a refold, nothing major.”

“Still,” he drawled as he set the pile on the coffee table in front of him and pulled up the first item to fold it. His brows pinched and he held up the item with a look of confusion on his face. He stretched out the item – a pair of red boxer briefs – and gave her a rather perplexed look. “Ehm. These aren’t mine.”

“No,” she agreed. “They aren’t.” She shrugged. “You haven’t given me any of your laundry to do, but if you have some, today’s my laundry day.”

“Nah.” His voice was still drawled when he spoke. “Capable of doing my own, ta. But Rose, I must ask: Are you wearing men’s boxers now?” his lips pursed outward. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind. Nothing at all. But you always did seem to prefer something … well … something more delicate, lacy, and feminine.”

She snatched the boxers off him with a shake in her head. “They’re not mine,” she answered with a roll in her eyes.

“Bit big for Mark,” he muttered as he held up another pair. “Unless the lad’s outer clothing is somehow transdimensionsal and is hiding a far bigger body than I think he’s got.”

“You daft git,” she came back with a laugh as she snatched free this pair from his fingers as well. “They’re not Marks. Not mine. They’re Brax’s.”

His eyes blew wide. “Oh hold on,” he said almost angrily. “Don’t tell me he’s got you doing his laundry now, Rose. That. _That_ I won’t allow.” His hand flicked toward the kitchen. “Not like he hasn’t already got you slaving on other things…”

“ _Slaving_ means I have no choice in the matter,” she challenged him. “And he always made sure that I was on board with anything he wanted to have set up here. He never once forced me to take part in anything I wasn’t willing to do.” She sharply folded the underwear with two folds. “He _asked_ , never insisted. This has always been my choice.”

His eyes flicked to the growing pile of red boxers. “And that?”

“Blimey, Doctor,” she huffed. “Like everything else, _my choice_ , yeah? I needed some extra items for my dark wash to justify the load, and went into his capsule to see if he had anything for me to throw in. Found his hamper in the bathroom.” She pulled the boxers into her lap and turned to him. “And speaking of. The console room in there was an absolute disaster. What happened in there?”

“What do you mean?”

She looked toward the silent, sentient machine resting against the wall. “It looked like a hurricane had gone through it.” He motioned to stand and investigate, but she held him back. “I’ve cleaned up the mess already. But it was pretty bad in there. Usually he’s meticulous in keeping his capsule clean.”

“I know,” he intoned with curiosity. “Can’t help you with it, I’m afraid.” He dropped his eyes to hers. “I suppose you could ask the others, Romana maybe?” His lips pursed then tightened. After a swallow he let his brows fall. “You know what? I’ll ask her. No sense in you worrying yourself.”

“Bit late on that,” she sighed. “I’m not liking this, Doctor. Not at all. You and Romana are all upset with him and won’t tell me why. His capsule was a disaster. Now he’s gone, and not answering his phone when I try and call him.”

“Why are you trying to call him?” he asked with a hint of darkness in his tone.

“Because it’s been nearly two weeks since any of us have heard from him and I’m worried,” she answered with a pinch in her eye.

“He’s fine,” he replied shortly. “One person you don’t ever have to worry about is Braxiatel.” He huffed through his nose. “He’ll show up when he wants to show up.” He swallowed thickly. “That’s _if_ he wants to show up at all.”

“What did he do?” she asked breathily with a pinch in her eye and urgency in her whisper. “Tell me, Doctor. What happened?”

He rubbed his hands on his thighs, shifting forward and backward in his lean for a moment. He lightly shook his head, his expression shifting between several phases before he finally settled on indifferent. He looked up over his shoulder at the regathering of Time Lords at the table. “Looks like break is over,” he suggested quickly. He leaned to the side to kiss her temple. “We can talk about this later.”

“Sure,” she ground out with obvious displeasure and doubt.

He noted her annoyance. He could feel her frustration and annoyance … hell, he could taste it … but he merely offered her an apologetic smile. “My hearts are yours,” he vowed to her with a firm and chaste press of his lips to hers. “We’ll talk later, I promise you.”

She lifted her head to watch him leap up over the back of the couch. Bright purple socks, floppy at the toe, was the last she saw of him from where she was seated. She kept her head held upward as though expected a last second of affection before he disappeared, but it never came. Instead she heard his yelp of exclamation toward something that was said by the group, and then the low murmurs of the discussion picking back up.

She slumped in the chair. She folded while in a deep slouch. She muttered to herself. Finally, she packed the folded clothes into the laundry basket and let out a moan as she drew herself back to her feet and picked up the basket. She held it at her hip and looked over the edge of the couch toward the table. The Doctor looked in her direction and he gave her a beaming grin as he petted the space in between his hearts.

“Yes Doctor,” she sighed to herself as she manoeuvred herself around the coffee table to exit the room. “I love you, too.” The end of her quiet declaration ended in a hiss as her shin collided with the corner of the coffee table. Her lips curled and she hopped a little into a light limp off her toe at the sting of it. She let the frustration of it shove hard at the door to Braxiatel’s capsule. The door flew open with a harsh hiss, and then a thud as it opened to it’s max and bounced in the hinges.

“Sorry, Girl,” Rose murmured with a wince in her brow and a pet at the console as she passed it. “Didn’t mean to take it out on you.” 

There was a sad and lonely hum in her mind from the ship. It was obvious she missed her pilot. This had been Brax’s ship since he graduated the academy a millennium ago. It was a rare moment when he wasn’t within arms reach of her.

“I know,” she cooed at a small series of beeps from the console and an increasing hum inside her mind. “I miss him as well.”

The hum in her mind became more urgent. A warning for escape as the beeping of the main console increased in pitch and frequency. Rose set the basket down on the floor beside her and put her hands on the console. Curiosity had her take a look at a monitor, which had lit up brightly and scrolled with spinning circular words. While she understood the written form of Gallifreyan, and even the spoken language used by the Time Lords, she was still unable to decipher the circular glyphs of it.

“What’s all this then?” she queried under her breath. “Can you translate for me, please?”

The hum in her mind grew to a heated warning, and she could have sworn that she felt a mental shove toward the door. She stumbled with the strength of it and turned toward the open doors, ready to scarper and warn the Doctor and Romana that something really wasn’t right with the ship. Her husband’s name flew urgently from her mouth with a terrified yell and she launched into a run. She heard the sudden shift of his chair on the floor of her living room, the flip and crash of papers and glassware from the table as he leapt across it, and then the thud of his feet as he hit the ground and ran.

She heard him call her name and say that he was coming, but before either of them could meet at the ship’s entrance, the doors slammed shut. Her shoulder collided hard with the door, the thud of her body echoing throughout the expansive console room. With a wince of pain from her shoulder, she pounded against the door with her fist.

“Doctor!”

He could hear him slapping hard on the other side of the door. “Rose? What’s happening? Open the doors. Let me in!”

“I can’t,” she yelled back as she tugged on the door, pulling and shoving at it. The door refused to budge. “It won’t open!”

There was a slow whine and wheeze from the central column. Rose gasped and spun toward the sound. Her back immediately went up against the door, and her hands flew into her hair. “No! No. No. No no. You can’t be in flight. You can’t.”

The pounding of the door from the outside, and the Doctor’s panicked voice yelling for her faded off into silence. She knew the ship had dematerialised and was in flight. 

Her head shook and she remained frozen in place. She ventured toward hope. Perhaps Brax had put in a remote call for his ship? Maybe this wasn’t a dangerous flight toward something nefarious and evil that might result in her death and destruction. 

A hum in her mind warned her that it certainly wasn’t her pilot in control of her flight path. The shrill and almost piercing him in her mind told her that the ship was fighting the flight path she’d been set on, but it wasn’t likely she had enough strength to fight it alone. She needed input, and she needed it fast if the two of them were going to escape.

“Right,” Rose breathed out after a second. “Right. Okay. So…” she ran back to the console and let her eyes drift across the array of lights, switches, dials, and levers to try and figure out what she could do to help. But who was she kidding? She had no idea how to pilot a damn time ship, did she?

She looked up to the very top of the time rotor column, which reached up high into the arched ceilings of the console room. “Can you call the Doctor?” she asked. “Can he help? I’m sure he can. He’s a specialist in TARDIS flight, yeah?”

The return hum was definitely one inside negative territory.

“Why not?” she cried out. Her hands fisted at her hair as she felt the light pitching and volleying in the ship as she fought against whatever force had her in flight. “He’s our best bet. Or Romana! What about Romana? She’s piloted you before, yeah?”

Rose quickly pulled her phone from her trouser pocket. “Then I’ll find them,” she declared with a curl in her lip as she thumbed through her list of contacts. The Doctor obviously wasn’t in her phone. He had been uncontactable for several years – for obvious reasons – and had never been added to her contact list. She hunted for Romana’s contact. She’d never had to call her before, but for sure Brax would have added her in there just in case, yeah?

Rose stomped her foot on the ground with frustration that Romana wasn’t in her list, either.

She let go of Brax’s big word; the filthy curse he saved for use the worst possible situation; and thumbed at the only Time Lord contact that existed on her phone: Brax. Not that she thought she’d have any luck with it. She’d been trying to call him twice a day for two weeks and he’d never picked up. And of course, as she was routed toward a voicemail message she’d memorized by bloody rote by now, she growled hard. She continued to growl as Brax’s voice from his previous incarnation spoke firmly and smoothly down the line.

“ _You’ve reached Irving Braxiatel of the Braxiatel Collection. I’m afraid I can’t take your call right now, but please leave your name and number and a brief message, unless of course you are reversing the charges. In which case: Don’t. Thank you, and good bye_.”

The sing-song manner by which he ended the message made her growl. How could he possibly be so calm and debonair when she was in such a perilous and terrifying predicament…

…Yes, she knew it was a voicemail greeting, not him… Didn’t matter.

“Brax!” she yelled down the phone. “For God’s sake, answer the phone. Please. I need your help. Your capsule. She and I. We’re trapped, and someone’s trying to get us. And I’m really scared because even though you have six of these ships parked in my house, you never one thought it might be a good idea to teach me how to use any of them!” She panted to hard breaths. “How can you not have thought to give me emergency training, Brax? _You_ , who plans for _everything_! Well, here’s a contingency you didn’t plan for, did you?” She ended with his particularly filthy Galifreyan curse.

She kept the line open and hit herself in the forehead with the top of her phone. “God, I don’t know what to do. Think, Rose. Think! What would any one of the three of them do?”

She heard the announcement over the line to say that she’d reached her message limit, and the phone disconnected. She looked at the phone, and at the face of the only man who could help them right now smiling inside a circle.

Her lip curled and the poked hard at the little phone icon to call him again. “I’m going to call, and keep calling until you pick up,” she snarled. “Over and over and over again.” Her eyes flicked to the console, and an iPhone charging dock. When his voicemail picked up again, Rose slammed her phone into the dock. Her eyes were a challenge to the time ship. “Find him,” she growled to the column. “There’s a line to wherever Brax is. Find your pilot.”

She panted hard at the beeping of the column and the continued pitching of the ship as she struggled to maintain her fight. Her hands came down hard on the console. “You heard me, girl. Use my phone, the link to his phone, and _find_ … _your_ ... _pilot_!” She panted hard. “And you give that ignorant, arrogant Lord of Time warning that if he doesn’t pick up and answer the damn phone, I’ll do what I did with the Doctor’s TARDIS and rip open your console, look in your heart, and find him myself…”

“Well there really is no need for that,” Braxiatel’s voice cooed with amusement from the monitor ahead of her. “And I must say, you are a persistent one, aren’t you, Rose?”

Her eyes flicked upward. “Brax,” she breathed out with relief. “Oh, thank God.”

“Actually,” he corrected. “Your God had nothing to do with it. You can, however, thank my ship. Genius move and bravo to you for using her to force me to answer, Rose. I’m impressed.”

“Be a facetious shit later,” she said with a whimper. Her relief at seeing his face finally allowed her to shake off her panic and anger, and now worry and fear were settling in. “I really need your help.”

“Romana can’t help you?”

Rose shook her head. “Romana and the Doctor, they’re back at the house, and…”

“Thete’s _home_?” His lips pursed and he nodded. “Yes, after that night, I should have expected his return, and…” his eyes hardened with worry. “Hold on. You said he was _back_ at the house.” He watched her slow nod. “And you’re in my capsule, which means…” The view of him on the monitor changed position and his eyes lowered to suggest that he was looking down at a keyboard at the bottom of his phone screen. His eyes widened and he drew a hand down his face. “Oh, Hell, Rose. What’ve you done?”

“Nothing!” she whined out. “I just came in here to put away your laundry, and next thing you know the doors had slammed behind me and your ship dematerialised.”

His eyes weren’t on her, they were still lowered from the camera, and it seemed as though he was doing his best to read data from the phone. Once again, his hand moved to cup around his mouth, underneath his nose. “Oh, this is going to take some work,” he muttered to himself. “Definitely doable, though.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked him worriedly. “What happened?”

“Recall,” he answered simply. There was a lift in his shoulders and once again the image of him shifted somewhat. Now it looked to Rose as though he’d found something to lean his elbows on while he furiously thumbed away at his keyboard. His eyes didn’t lift to hers, instead remained focused on his task. “Seems old Rassilon wants his toy back. Taking away my titles, my regenerations, and my whole damn life just wasn’t enough for him – now he wants the very last piece of me.”

“Oh Brax,” she whimpered out. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

She shook her head with slow and tight movements. 

“Had a feeling you might not.” His eyes lifted briefly. “Romana and Thete didn’t tell you?”

“They won’t tell me anything,” she answered him. “Not real important right now to them. What, now that the war’s been won and all. They’re too busy planning their political takeover of the Rassilon fellow you all seem to deify, yet all despise at the same time.”

His voice was a whisper. “It’s over? The Time Lords. Gallifrey. They live?”

“Come home, Brax, and I’ll tell you all about it.” She smiled. “About what your brother did to save them all.”

His face hardened and he looked back down to his task. “Can’t right now, Rose. Got some things on the go, myself, that I have to take care of.” His lips pursed a moment as he seemed to think through what he had to do next. A quiet Gallifreyan curse passed through his lips. “This would be much easier if I was on the ship rather than having to access her systems remotely with an iPhone.”

“I didn’t even know there was an app for that,” she remarked with a rise in her brows. “What’s it called? TARDIS Control Centre Lite?”

He smiled an amused grin but didn’t look up from his task. “Yeah. Wouldn’t recommend it, though. Kills your data plan.” His smile fell and his expression turned to concentration. “Do me a favour, Rose. Can you please let me know if the Synchronic Feedback Unit is activated?”

“The what?”

“Underneath the monitor. Big red light next to the green switch.”

“Looks a bit like a snail shell?”

“I suppose so.”

She looked at the light, then gave it a tap. “No, Brax. It’s dark. Is that bad?”

He shook his head. “No. That’s good, Rose. That’s real good. It means we’ve got time to put this beautiful girl of mine back on a homeward path.” He cleared his throat and rolled his head on his neck. “Though if you see if light up, let me know.”

She tapped her fingers on the console. “You said Rassilon’s looking for this ship?”

“Seems to be,” he said with a shrug. “The access codes I’m trying to rewrite are from strings that are fairly standard presidential office protocols. They use them when they’re trying to recall the craft of a criminal Time Lord. I’ve sent these out more than a few hundred times myself.” 

“And here I was thinkin’ all you Time Lords were good little boys and girls.”

“You’ve met my brother, right?” He licked at his lip and then settled the tip of his tongue in the very edge of his mouth. A made a sound of concentration, a sound of exclamation, and then exhaled a breath. “Right, I think that’s done it.” His eyes lifted back up to the camera. “I’ve released the capsule from Rassilon’s grasp, and she should be on her way back to the house.”

“Are you sure?” She was still worried, and until those doors opened to let the Doctor back in, she wasn’t going to be completely relieved.

“Yes, quite sure,” he answered her. “I’ve uploaded a few lines of code that Thete will have to execute in all ships once this girl materialises so that she, and the others, can’t be captured again…”

“I thought you said your ship was untraceable.”

“She is,” he assured her. “But while she can’t be properly located, safety protocols installed into her systems mean she can have a temporal lasso thrown around her for retrieval in a sticky situation.” He exhaled. “I’ve temporarily removed that safety protocol for now.”

“So I’m not going to be kidnapped by Rassilon, then?”

“Not today,” he assured her. “I wouldn’t worry about you being discovered by Rassilon and his cronies. He may be smart, but I am much smarter.”

She chuckled. “You sound like the Doctor.”

“Please don’t ever make that comparison again,” he said with a shake in his head, but a smile on his face. “I am much more clever than my woprat brother.”

“When are you coming home?” she asked with a rush that took the friendly smile from his face. “We need you, Brax. Me, Romana, the kids. We miss you.”

“You’re better off without me,” he said with a sigh. He looked off to one side as though watching the approach of someone. “I have to go, Rose.”

“No, please, don’t. Talk to me, Brax.” She looked to the doorway of the ship as she shuddered in materialisation. The pounding on the door from the Doctor began again in earnest. “I’m home,” she said to him. 

“Door release is the big fat dial with a symbol that looks like a swoop and a hook with a circle at the top.”

“Not opening it till you talk to me, Brax,” she insisted. Her face winced a flinch with every pound of the Doctor’s hand against the door. “Why can’t you come home? Why do you think we’re better off without you?”

“Let him in,” he said to her firmly. “I can hear him, Rose. Thete’s not happy.”

“Well neither am I right now,” she growled with a slap at the console. “You left me, Brax. You’re not allowed to do that.” She panted. “You didn’t even say goodbye, just up and disappeared in the middle of the night.”

“I had no choice,” he ventured quietly, keeping his voice low.

“That’s bullshit, and you know it. There’s _always_ a choice, Brax,” she challenged him hotly. 

“I think we’ve learned over the past half a century that that isn’t the case, Rose,” he answered solemnly. He opened up his app and hovered the pad of his thumb over the door release for the capsule. “And for what it might be worth to you, I’m really very sorry.”

She panted a moment, staring at his expression which was forced flat and emotionless. “God, what’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing,” he assured her. His eyes shifted as though looking over her shoulder to the door that was behind her, then they shifted back down to hers. “There’s _nothing_ wrong with you, Rose.”

“Yeah there is,” she argued softly. “Brax. I lose _everyone_. Everyone I love,” she said with a sob in the back of her throat. “I lost my dad. My first Doctor left me, then the one who followed him didn’t even want to acknowledge our love even existed.” She panted. “Then Thete: the one who loved me so much he married me. He was taken from me, too. You? You’re gone now. My friend, Donna, she was taken from me _by_ the Doctor. Soldier after soldier was taken from me one after another by war and injury. Everyone leaves me in the end.” She looked to the side of the capsule, toward the direction of the entire city of people still living in capsules in a small Chiswick back yard. “Soon, they’ll all be gone, too, and I’ll be completely alone.”

“Thete’s home, now,” he said with firmness in his voice.

She exhaled a sad breath. “Yeah. But for how long?”

The Doctor’s voice spoke gently from behind her. “For the rest of our lives,” he vowed inside a fiercely passionate tone. 

She gasped in fright at him standing there when she hadn’t released the door to let him in. Her hand was a loose fist at her chest that quickly spanned into a flattened palm over her heart. “You. You gave me a fright.”

The Doctor’s eyes lifted to the image of his brother on the monitor. “Hello Brax.”

“Thete,” Braxiatel answered flatly to complete their typical greeting toward each other. “So you’re aware of the situation: Rassilon tried to reclaim the capsule. Put a lasso on her to pull her back to Gallifrey. I managed to remotely override the presidential codes, but I expect they’ll have new lines of code written and they’ll make a reattempt at takeover shortly. I’ve uploaded some code to this ship, and ask that you execute it on this, and all of the ships still grounded here on Earth.”

He strode quickly up to the console and didn’t hesitate to pull across a secondary monitor. He pulled his glasses from his chest pocket and slipped them on. He covered his chin in his hand and scanned the lines scrolling across the monitor. “Yep. Bit clumsy, Brax, but it should do the trick.”

“Think you can do better?”

“ _Think_ , Brax?” he countered with a laugh. “I _know_ I can do better than this.”

“On an iPhone using only your thumbs on a keypad made for feminine hands inside of three minutes while trying to calm down a frantic human female?”

“Two minutes,” he said with a smirk and a light waggle in his shoulders. “Tops. And that’s while I’m giving her a cuddle and assuring her that my hearts beat for her.” His amusement fell for the briefest of seconds and he looked to the monitor. “And thank you,” he breathed out almost inaudibly. “I don’t need to tell you…”

“You’re right,” he cut in quick. “You don’t need to tell _me_ , brother.” His eyes caught sight of Romana waiting at the door, Rose now by her side. There was a waver in his voice. “I have to go.”

“Yeah, okay,” the Doctor muttered with a wave of his hand. He wasn’t even looking at the image of his brother on the monitor anymore, such was his focus on the lines of code he was reworking. “You know where we are when you get hungry and need a shower.”

“Before you go, Braxiatel,” Romana called out. She didn’t pull away from the door, and her only view of him was on a small monitor twenty feet from where she was standing. She held her hand in the centre of her chest, between her hearts and dipped her head to him. Her face was firm and expressionless as she lifted her face to see him repeat the gesture. “I _will_ be here when you return, husband.”

“I’ll try not to take too long, then. Good bye.”

Romana’s eyes narrowed to slits when the screen went blank and Brax disappeared. It was clear she held more than annoyance in her delicate, yet very powerful features. “Find him,” she demanded toward the Doctor, who seemed caught off guard by the order.

“I’m sorry, what?” he said with a cough. “Find _him_? Irving Braxiatel? You want _me_ to find the man that cannot be found if he doesn’t want you to find him.”

“Your mate was able to.” She looked him up and down. “I would expect you to be able to do the same.”

Rose frowned at that. “ I’m not entirely sure if I should be offended by that or not.”

The Doctor rose to his full height. “Leave him be, Romana. Don’t push him.”

“I said find him,” she ordered firmly. “That’s not a request requiring your approval or disapproval. Rassilon is clearly looking for him, Doctor. We need to find him before Rassilon does.” Her hands moved to her hips. “When I next return to Gallifrey, it will be to reclaim Gallifrey for her people, not run a rescue mission on a fool man of Lungbarrow who’s chosen to hide because his pride is wounded.”

The Doctor’s eyes lifted to her and were unreadable when he answered in the affirmative. “I’ll run some scans from my TARDIS once I have finished here, Lady President.” His eyes moved back toward the console, hardened on the blue text on a black screen in front of them.

Braxiatel wasn’t in hiding. This much he knew was fact. His brother was up to something, and whatever it was, was an endeavour that was dangerous to him and everyone else around him. He would find his brother, absolutely he would. Piece of cake. But he wouldn’t tell Romana he’d found him – not until he knew without a doubt that the whole lot of them were safe.

He exhaled and focused a hard stare on the code, and the hidden message within it. An old cypher used by the pair of them when they were adolescents trying to hide their mischief from their father.

“By the Gods, Brax,” he muttered out as he backspaced and deleted the message. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Braxiatel shut the connection between he and the new house Lungbarrow and held it at his chin as a man dressed in black approached him from the door of a darkened building that overlooked the lake. 

“Irv,” he said with a low and filthy tone of voice as he handed him a can of warm beer.

“The name’s Braxiatel,” he corrected him. “Not Irv, not Irving, and not Brax. I detest the use of nicknames.” He looked at the beer and turned up his nose at it. “No, thanks. Wouldn’t drink _that_ swill if it meant the difference between life and death.

“Granted,” the man said with a smile of black, grey teeth. “It’s not phurishan ale, but it’s close.”

“Again,” Braxiatel said with a sneer. “Swill. No thank you.” He turned to face him. “Well?”

“I think we have a deal,” he said with a shrug. He held up wat looked to be an old medical bag. “Got what you need, here. Did you bring what we asked for.”

Braxiatel held up a thin tube that looked to be a syringe filled with luminescent fluid. “Got it right here.” He waggled it side to side in the fingers of one hand and held out his other hand for the bag. As the man handed over the bad, Braxiatel moved quickly to stab the syringe into the man’s neck, emptying it completely with a single press of his thumb on the plunger. He moved in to help the man fall without sound to the grasses at their feet.

“You betrayed us?” he asked with slurred breath. “You betrayed the Dyroes.”

“Yeah,” he breathed out with a shrug. “I do tend to do that.”

“They will avenge my death.”

“No,” he corrected him as he sharply tugged the bag from his hand and then petted him on the shoulder. “You’re not going to die, old son. Just be a little … out of sorts for a few hours.” He leaned down. “No death to avenge. At least, not yet.”

He stood up and tucked the bag in close at his hip. He looked into the darkened skies that blanketed the east coast of Canada and let out a sigh at the chill in the air. Snow flakes fell slowly from above, landing in thick and fluffy clumps on his jacket.

He pulled at his scarf and tightened the collar of his jacket and let out a whistle as he walked down along a snow-covered street.

~~oooOOOooo~~


	4. Quick Trip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Romana insists that the Doctor take Rose on a little trip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Doctor and Rose heavy chapter. These two have some things to get through.
> 
> Been a tough day today ... You can probably tell.
> 
> I really really hope you enjoy this chapter.

~~oooOOOooo~~

After fully deleting Braxiatel’s message, the Doctor remained at the console for a moment. He still wore his black-rimmed glasses as he leaned down on his hands and stared at the screen and its spinning circular Gallifreyan text. It said nothing of real importance right now. Just a screen saver of sorts that scrolled through random systems analysis of the ship herself. Everything seemed in order, and the data did suggest that Braxiatel’s remote fix was holding firm. 

The Doctor had added a couple of lines of his own to Braxiatel’s code. It included a nasty little package upload for the next attempt to push Presidential Office access to the ship. Oh, nothing that would shut down what was left of the systems back at the Capitol, but it would prove to be a bit of a reminder to the lot of them that the Lungbarrow boys really didn’t like to be toyed with or threatened…

…They were their father, after all. Might’ve been good for Rassilon to remember that – or at the very least for his advisors to issue him a reminder of it. He could probably forward along a complete dossier of old Ulysses, his legendary exploits, and the genetic analysis performed to loom both of his sons. The best of Ulysses was also his worst, and both the Doctor and Braxiatel had been loomed with what the house considered were the most _desirable_ facets of his character. 

“I recognise that expression,” Romana said at his side with deliberate intention to interrupt his thoughts. “And it rarely ends well when you get _that_ look.”

The Doctor let out a small gasp and a shake of his shoulders to clear his mind. He took off his glasses, folding them slowly. “If you’re waiting on word of my search for Brax, then I’m afraid I have to tell you I haven’t even started to execute a scan.”

“As you’re still in his Capsule instead of your TARDIS, I had already come to that conclusion,” she said with a sigh. 

“And you came in here to hurry me up?”

She shook her head as she leaned down to press her hands into the console in a lean. “In your own time,” she breathed with apology in her voice. “But I am sure that you appreciate my urgency to find him, Doctor. Right now, his life is as fragile as your own mate’s is. Until this moment I’ve never had to worry about death being permanent.” She exhaled a shaken breath. “It quite frankly terrifies me.”

His brows lifted and pulled just slightly centre as he contemplated his own worries toward the singular life of Rose Tyler. “I know the feeling, Romana.” He looked toward her. “Brax might no longer have the regenerative power of a Time Lord, but he’s still Gallifreyan with a Gallifreyan lifespan. Baring accidents, his life could extend well into a half century or more.” He looked back at the monitor and swallowed thickly. “Rose, on the other hand.” He ran his hand down his face. “Such a short existence. I’ve already missed so much.” He blinked and his voice lessened to a whisper. “And it feels like we’re wasting more so very precious time with this tip-toeing around each other and the half conversations we never get to finish.”

He finally pocketed his glasses and kept his hand on the pocket he popped them in. “There’re just too many distractions here, too much for me to do, and we can’t get the time we need to get it all out and find our common ground again.” He sighed and tilted his ear toward his shoulder in an attempt to look at her. “I’m hardly even seeing her.”

Romana nodded slowly. “I’ve set precise return coordinates on your TARDIS to have you arrive back into this timeline within an hour of now.”

He turned to her fully, his brows coming together in question. “I’m sorry, you’ve done what? And more importantly: why have you done it?”

“Because I agree with you,” she said without looking at him. Her eyes were on a tattered edged photograph which had been tucked into the corner of a brace on the central column. It was an image of she and Braxiatel in their ceremonial robes outside council chambers. A candid shot taken as he had been lightly reciting a joke that had her in clutches of laughter. She plucked the photograph from its place and held it in both hands. She sighed as she ran her thumbs across the glossy surface. She then handed him the photograph. “Because their lives are now so short, there’s no time to waste on anger, confusion, fear, nor heartbreak. We need to laugh, tell jokes, make love, and make the best of every moment we have left with them.”

“Still not quite following,” he said with a pinch in his brow. He stared at the image, and of a rare capture of Braxiatel with a relaxed expression. Smiling mid-word and gazing with adoration toward his wife who held her arms across her belly in laughter. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him like this…”

“You’ve missed a lot,” she said to him with an apologetic tone as she took the photograph and replaced it on the column. 

“I know.”

“So I’m insisting that you take a moment to take your wife on a trip to rediscover each other.” She turned from the photograph to put her back to it completely. She leaned her rump on the console edge and folded her arms across her chest. “Right now. Take her hand, run into your TARDIS, and go somewhere. Just the two of you. No distractions.”

“Romana…”

“Take a day, a few days, a week,” she continued. “Take as long as you need to talk, to reconnect, and to become lovers again.” She exhaled. “Because what the pair of you have right now is not healthy for either of you. You’re just moving through the motions. A full soul bond binds you together, but you couldn’t be more disconnected.”

“Yeah,” he drawled. “I know.” He looked down at the console and shrugged a shoulder. “But we can work it out, Romana. We don’t need…”

“Don’t tell me what you _do_ or _don’t_ need,” she countered with sharp indignance. “You and him, you’re the same. You think you know better than anyone else. But let me tell you this, Doctor: Neither of you have a clue as to what it’s like to have your hearts beat for one of you. Ignorant creatures, the pair of you.”

He hmphed but didn’t outright disagree with her.

“As one who suffers the condition of loving a man of your house, let me tell you just what it is you need right now.” She tightened the hold of her arms across her chest. “You need to take her somewhere beautiful, somewhere quiet, somewhere you won’t face distractions of any kind. Initiate an actual discussion. You need to let her yell at you, to stomp her feet, scream, and cry.” She gave him a hard glare. “And you better do your own fair share of shedding tears for her pain as well.” She shifted and looked down. “Most of all, Doctor. Be honest. If she asks you a direct question, then answer it ... _directly_ … whether or not you want to or if it might make you feel uncomfortable.”

“Yeah,” he drawled out on a long breath. She was right. Of course, she was. But she was Romanadvoratrelundar, of course she was right. Dare him or anyone to tell her otherwise.

She rolled her shoulders and hip to push herself from the lean she had on the console. “As I said to you, I programmed return coordinates into your TARDIS to ensure that you will return to this location no more than an hour after you left. So, take your time, and work yourselves out, and return here a full man with actual purpose.” She walked toward the doorway and looked down her shoulder to offer him a sideward glance. “Because we need you if we’re to move forward here. Gallifrey and her children need you. And right now, we don’t have you. Not fully.”

He slid his hands into his trouser pockets and watched quietly as Romana left the ship. He pressed his lips together in thought and grit his teeth enough to dimple his cheek. His mind waded through the many planets in his mind that could offer he and Rose ample opportunity to quietly work through things together without any interruptions at all. He narrowed his selections down to three planets within only a few moments, but apparently those three seconds of consideration were too long for Romana’s liking. She poked her head in through the doors, her expression one of annoyance that he hadn’t immediately stalked out of the capsule to retrieve his wife.

“Well?” she asked with a shrill voice of demand. 

He rolled his eyes and walked an almost petulant gait toward the doors. His eyes narrowed at her as he passed. “Demanding little thing, aren’t you?”

“You have _no_ idea.”

“Beginning to think I do, thanks,” he chirped in reply. He gave her a cheeky close-mouthed smile that lasted only enough time for his face to be out of her peripheral, and then schooled his expression to search for Rose. He found her deep in the hallway near the front door, in light conversation with Lord Phiroi – the Lord with whom she’d developed a close bond throughout their time working together.

He gave the Lord a small smile as he approached. Phiroi gave him a light nod of greeting and spoke his name with respect. The Doctor didn’t perform the polite recital of Phiroi’s name in return. Instead, he slipped his hand into Rose’s and leaned down to her ear.

“Come with me,” he said softly as he tightened his grasp.

Rose looked down at their hands, and then up to his face. There was worry in her eyes, he could see that, but he didn’t let it sway him. “We’re under orders from our Lady President,” he said with a smile. “Best we don’t argue, yeah?” He gave a light tug of his hand. “Come on.”

She dutifully followed him, offering a small wave toward Phiroi as they wandered down the hallway toward the Doctor’s TARDIS. When he pushed on the door and stepped inside, she paused just outside. “Doctor?”

Caught by the hold of her hand, he stepped back out into the hallway, close enough to her that he was up against her chest. He didn’t release her hand, but he did lightly touch his other hand to her face in a tender gesture. He ghosted his thumb along her cheekbone. “It’s time that you and me had a little talk, don’t you?”

She bit awkwardly at her lip and shifted her eyes from his. “You know, Doctor. What you heard in Brax’s capsule. What I said…” her eyes moved back to his. “I’m sorry, I was just…”

He touched his thumb to her lip and lightly shushed her. “Not here, Rose,” he said softly. “Come with me. A quick trip. You and me.”

She looked into the TARDIS, an interior she hadn’t seen in nearly five years – not since their heartbreaking meeting in Australia. She was apprehensive, despite feeling the calming, welcoming hum in her mind from the ship. “I don’t know, Doctor,” she whispered out. Despite her apprehension, she did actually step over the threshold and into the ship. Immediately her mind was taken back to a much younger Rose Tyler and her awe upon stepping into the TARDIS for the very first time. “I forgot how beautiful she was in this incarnation.”

“Ahh, yes,” he said with a nod of his head. “More used to the more goth-style desktop theme, aren’t you?” He rubbed at the back of his head as he walked up the ramp toward the centre console. “I s’pose I can ask the old girl to make a quick clothing change if you want.”

“No need,” she sang out appreciatively as she stroked her hand along one of the coral branches down into the limb crotch and then back up along the other branch. “You always remember your first TARDIS, yeah? My first and my favourite desktop theme.” She looked up and gave him a smile. “She’s beautiful.”

In the midst of programming the coordinates to the planet he’d chosen for them, the Doctor caught sight of that magnificent smile of hers as she made her affectionate walk around the walkway below the console platform. Very quickly his mind threw him back to the first moment she’d stepped on board after he’d regenerated into this form. Her jacket half off her shoulders, blonde hair hidden underneath a warm cap, knapsack on the floor beside her, all ready and eager to begin their adventures once more.

He held out his hand to her. “Come here, Rose,” he requested affectionately. His fingers flexed and pulsed with eagerness to thread in through hers. “Doesn’t feel right when you’re not up here with me.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear and made a quick bound up the step toward him. “Oh,” she breathed out with humour. “You’ve done alright without me, I think. Martha and Donna, they were good for you, yeah?”

He quickly took her hand in his. “Yes,” he admitted. “But they weren’t _you_.”

He pressed his lips into her temple, holding them their for a moment as he drew in her presence within his ship. “I’ve missed you,” he conceded quietly, “here, with me, on the TARDIS.” 

He moved his hand to turn a dial, and Rose quickly separated their hands to hold his wrist. “Doctor. What are you doing?”

“Taking you on a trip,” he said as though it was the obvious intent of bringing her onboard in the first place – which it was.

“I don’t know if we should,” she said with a light measure of worry in her voice.

His brows lifted and his eyes widened with pleading. “Why not?”

“The kids,” she answered quickly. “We can’t leave without them. I mean, what if you mess up coming home and they’re ten years older or something.” 

“I’m really never going to live that one down, am I?” he said with a sigh. “One time, Rose. One time I brought you home a few minutes off schedule…”

“Twelve months,” she said with her own wide-eyed look. “And it’s hardly the first time, Doctor. I mean, we pretty much landed outside your intended date and time every time we took a trip.”

“Not all the time,” he defended with a slouch in his shoulders and a backward dip in his head. He stood straight up. “There were a couple of times I got it right.” He counted off his fingers. “The high school think for Mickey – you remember, we met Sarah Jane.” He grinned with remembrance. “Oh good old Sarah Jane…”

“Best you don’t call her old, yeah?” she reminded him. “Not polite.”

“Neither am I, really,” he said with a shrug. His eyes lit up and his hands shifted over the controls again, this time unhindered by Rose’s hands trying to stop him. “And there was that time your mum called for help because of that Elton fellow upsetting her. Got you there on time for that one, didn’t I?” He nodded. “Yeah, see? I know what I’m doing. You can trust me to get us home no more than an hour from when we left.” He gave her a wink. “My vow to you, my Hearts. Quick trip to Eotune to reconnect, talk, snuggle, cuddle, kiss a little bit…” his voice lowered to an almost inaudible series of syllables that might’ve indicated that he was suggesting something a little more than just a kiss and a cuddle, but then quickly lifted back up again to his typical excited tone and volume. “And back in time to do the school run and pick up the kids. What’dya say?”

“I really don’t know,” she breathed out.

“Oh come on, Rose,” he whined. “Live a little. I promise you we’ll be home in time.” He stepped back and pointed toward the monitor. “Look, return coordinates are already set.” He poked his finger at a series of numbers that Rose would never be able to decipher. “See? Today’s date, one hour from now. Back here, New Lungbarrow…” He let out a surprised humph. “Interesting. Just how’d we end up with that name, then?”

She tilted her head at him. If he wasn’t aware of Brax’s renaming of the house, then he obviously didn’t input the return coordinates. “Romana set the return coordinates, didn’t she?” she asked with a smile.

“If I say yes, will you let me pull this lever and take us to Eotune?” His brows were high as he indicated the dematerialisation lever in front of him. He pinched his thumb and finger together. “Just a little trip, Rose. Only 100-light years away from Earth. Not too far away. Still within Mutter’s Spiral.” He slouched a little. “Please?”

“Okay,” she said with a smile. Despite any apprehensions she had, and of course her worry for the kids if the Doctor messed up any part of this landing, she couldn’t help but feel the thrill of it inside her soul. “But promise me, Doctor…”

“For once,” he begged of her as he pulled back the lever and the rotor column began to pulse and shift above his head. “You can absolutely trust me on this, Rose.”

Rose lifted her head, closed her eyes, and breathed out a long sigh as the whine and wheeze of the TARDIS in motion reached down deep inside her soul. A whimper escaped her as her hand clutched at the console edge and she let the sound of the TARDIS fill her completely. 

The Doctor’s arms shifted either side of her, his chest up against her back. Movement in his arms suggested he was leaning around her to toggle some necessary flight controls. “One day,” he breathed against her hear in a low and husky tone. “It’ll be me drawing sounds like that from you again.” He kissed her shoulder, and then her neck with chaste touches of his lips. “Hopefully sooner than later.”

As quickly as he was upon her, he pulled away again. “Hold on,” he warned her with an excited grin. “Synchronic Feedback Unit’s lit up, Rose. Less than a minute till materialisation.” He looked to her gave a wink as he leaned over the console to flip another small lever. “Ready for this?”

“Oh yes,” she breathed out a with a smile. 

There was a twinkle inside Rose’s eye that had been sorely absent since his return, and the Doctor revelled in her renewed spark. There was a thrill inside him to know that he’d managed to bring it back. He barely felt the materialisation of the TARDIS, even through the landing was rough enough that it threw Rose onto her back with a squeal and a laugh of excitement. He twisted the dial for the door release and leaned down to his laughing wife with a hand held out to her.

“Not very graceful now, are you?” he teased with a smile.

She was still giggling when she grabbed his hand and let him pull her up to a stand. “You lot keep saying that to me,” she gruffed playfully. She tugged her hand out of his and adjusted the skirt of her dress, which had twisted awkwardly during her fall. “And maybe if you were a bit more gentle with your landings, then I might not fall on my arse all the time.”

He took her hand back in his and gave a light laugh. “Come on,” he said excitedly with a tug toward the door. “I can’t wait to show you what’s outside.”

She had a laugh in her voice as she let him drag her toward the door. She waited for the required moment he took to take a quick look outside to ensure he’d landed them where he’d intended, and then let him take her by the hand onto the alien planet outside the TARDIS doors.

Her first stride out of the door showed none of the hesitation that she’d felt back at her home. She held onto her grinning travel guide’s hand with all of the trust she’d ever felt and let him step the both of them out onto a wide expanse of lavender grasses that led toward a cliff edge that overlooked a magnificent deep blue snow-tipped mountain range lit only by a large blue moon that was seated in the very centre of where the mountain ranges met in the distance.

Rose froze in place. Her heart caught in her throat at the vision of a perfect navy-blue sky littered with twinkling white stars half hidden behind a white and grey cloudy wash in a perfect crescent shape that framed the mood like a halo.

The Doctor stood at her side. Her hand was still held firmly within his and he stroked his thumb along the length of hers. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Bit like our cliff on Gallifrey,” she admitted on a breath. “But less orange.”

“And a lot less hot,” he finished for her. “I chose this place, this very specific place, for that reason.” He exhaled. “Gallifrey isn’t really accessible to us right now, and really, I don’t know that our cliff even still exists. Well, I know the forest no longer exists. Not much in the way of Flora on Gallifrey anymore.” He didn’t look at her. Instead he kept his eyes forward. Her drew in a deep breath and when he spoke next it was with a subdued tone of voice. “You opened up to me on a cliff just like this one. Told me what was in your heart.” He turned his head to look at her. “I was hoping you’d do the same for me here.”

She did catch the turn of his head but kept her eyes forward on the sight ahead of her. “We made love on a cliff like this as well,” she breathed out. “Are you hoping the same of that as well?”

“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t,” he admitted. “And while that’d be absolutely lovely, I think we have more important matters to deal with than love making.” He looked back ahead of him and swallowed thickly. “We were good at that. _Very_ good at it. It was not a part of our relationship that ever needed work.”

“Not much of us ever really did,” she said with a sigh. “At least not when we were on Gallifrey.”

Silence fell on them both at that moment. Neither of them seemed willing to start off the conversation, although they both knew they had to start talking. Their hands remained linked together, and his thumb still stoked tenderly along hers.

After a moment of silence that was becoming slightly uncomfortable to her, Rose drew in a sharp breath. She forced her shoulders to relax and looked to him with a smile. “So tell about it.”

His eyes shifted to hers with a slight pinch in them to show mild confusion as to just what she wanted him to tell her. “I’m sorry?” he managed in question.

“About the planet we’re on,” she clarified with a smile as she hooked her hair behind her ear. “Eotune, right?” She looked back out to the moon and its crescent halo. “Tell me about it.”

His brows lifted. “Oh. Oh, yes. Of course,” he managed out. He separated his hand from hers and let his jacket fall from his shoulders. With a flick he had it splayed out on the grass like a picnic blanket. “Not much of a history to it, really.” He lowered down onto his knees, and then to hips hip. He let out the smallest grunt as he manoeuvred himself to lie on his back propped up onto his elbows and his legs crossed at the ankle. He looked up at her with question in the rise of his brows. “Well?”

“Well, what?” she asked with a light smile.

“Are you going to come down here and join me,” he asked with a smile. “Let me regale you with the story of Eotune?”

She stood over him, her mind torn as to whether or not to lie at his side. Oh, she wanted to, there was no denying that, she wanted to lay at his side and let his voice hypnotise her like it always did when he softly lectured her about the planet he’d landed them on. But that was the problem right now, wasn’t it? His voice was hypnotic, and whether it was his intention or not, she’d fall quickly underneath his spell and would be tugging at his clothing and lifting her skirts to receive him in very little time.

God, she was already thinking of ways to manage their positioning to achieve connection in its most intimate form. When his eyes widened and he let out a surprised peep, Rose covered her face in her hand.

Damn soul bond…

“While that would be, ehm…” He blew out a breath and looked across the cliffs toward the moon with very wide eyes. “While that would be very lovely, Rose. _Very_ lovely. It’s probably not..”

“Oh shut up,” she said with a moan. She pointed to the corner of his splayed jacket. “I’ll just park myself here, then.”

He remained in his lean on his elbows and watched as she sat on her behind on the lower edge of his jacket and pulled her knees up to her chest. She loosely wrapped her arms around her knees and looked down at him with a smile. “So. Eotune?”

“A completely uninhabited planet,” he said quickly with a slight roll in his shoulders. “Wholly capable of supporting life of course.” He drew in a deep breath through his nose. “See? Atmospheric conditions perfect for supporting most oxygen-breathing species.” He gurgled just a little and let out a bit of a lazy purr. “Although the air is quite saturated with levels of Nitrous Oxide. Not enough that regular breathing will give you a bit of a momentary high, but take a good deep breath…” He looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to do just that. When she didn’t, he frowned. “Well?”

“Well, what?” she queried.

“Not going to try a deep breath?”

She rolled her eyes and deliberately inhaled a far deeper breath than she should have. In a moment she et out a short laugh and swayed a little as she drew in a couple more breaths following that.

“Yeah,” he warned her. “You might want to stop doing that.”

She stretched out and finally laid herself back on the jacket. Her breaths leveled out to normal and she gazed up at the stars that sprayed across the skies. “Where is home?” she asked after a moment.

He shifted his shoulder and his hip to scuffle a little bit closer to her. “Can’t see Earth’s solar system from here,” he answered her. “At least, not at this time in the planet’s rotation.” He lifted his knees and pointed at the ground between his legs. “Now Earth would be down here somewhere. So if we were to dig a hole right there, and burrowed through to the other side, then we’d see the twinkle of the sun at the centre of your solar system.”

She gave his shoulder a playful shove. “You daft git,” she said with a laugh. She then scuffled a little closer to him so that they now lay with their shoulders touching. Her eyes were above them again. “I actually mean’s Gallifrey,” she said with a sigh. “Is she up there somewhere?”

He lifted a pinstriped arm to a small twinkling light almost directly above them. “Gallifrey’s up there,” he said softly. “Still nearly 250 million miles from where we are right now…”

“And we’re looking at the light from Gallifrey from 250 million years ago, before the Time Lords, before Rassilon.”

“Before Gallifreyans crawled out of the swamp,” he continued. “Yeah. Just a baby my old planet back then.”

“Our planet,” she corrected with a whisper. “Doctor, it’s my home as well. I mean, okay, I know I wasn’t born there, but I still think of it as being my home.”

“And you want it to be again, don’t you?” he asked, daring to broach at least one of the topics they needed to discuss.

“Do _you_?” she asked him with a light waver in her voice. “And please, Doctor. Be honest.”

He blinked at the star he’d identified as the solar system that his home resided in. he truly hadn’t considered a permanent return to Gallifrey any time soon. Oh, sure, he knew it was in the cards at some point that he and Rose would chose to spend their lives there – meeting his children in the future had given him that much insight – but he honestly couldn’t say if it was a move he wanted to make right away.

Rose took his silence as him not sharing her same desire. She looked up at the star he’d pointed out and let out a sigh. “I want to go home,” she said after a moment. “Raise my children there. Let them attend the academy and become a Lord and Lady of time.”

“Which is their birthright,” he agreed with a whisper.

“And what you wanted for them when we were there,” she continued. “Secured a place for Mark at Mount. Cadon week after he was born. Remember that?”

“Hadn’t gotten around to enrolling Alirra before we got separated,” he said with a sigh as those memories moved into the front of his mind. Curse the damn memory package for only releasing these images when he directly had to think back without stumbling rather than providing it in one massive wash.

“And I get it,” she said after a swallow. “If after four hundred and fifty years of war and then getting back out there in all time and space you’ve changed your mind.” She exhaled. “I can’t fault you for that.”

“But your mind is still settled on a life back on Gallifrey,” he ventured. 

“We can’t live on the TARDIS,” she answered with a nod. “Not with two youngsters and a trio of wolves relying on us to, you know, keep them alive with food and shelter and no evil aliens trying to kill them.” She rolled onto her side to look at him looking up at the sky. She traced her eyes along his sideburn and then up along his jaw and to the perfect pout of his lower lip. Her voice lessened to a whisper. “I know you’re not ready for that right now, Doctor.”

His eyes remained on the stars above him. “I’m a husband and a father, Rose. There’s really no such luxury as _waiting_ until you’re ready.” He swallowed. “I was ready for it back then, and therefore..”

“Don’t _therefore_ it, Doctor,” she said with a huff as she turned to flop onto her back once more. Her eyes lifted to watch Gallifrey in the distance. “You had time to prepare back then. We started it slow and waited until the both of us were ready before creating our family.” She exhaled. “You. You’ve been blindsided with this. You’ve had a family thrown at you.”

“You’re still the family _I_ helped create,” he argued lightly. He took her hand and drew it to his lips. He pressed a kiss to her knuckle and held it against his lips. “And regardless of the worries you’ve got in your mind about who I am and my intentions moving forward, I’m not planning on swanning off or abandoning you.”

“And when your need to run across the universe becomes too great, Doctor?” she asked quietly. “What then? You’ll stay and regret it? Come to resent me and the kids because we’re holding you back.”

He had to close his eyes and bite at his instinct to growl at her for that. After a breath and then another he finally opened his eyes once more. “You need to give me more credit than that, Rose,” he warned her lightly. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that I won’t want to run from time to time. Gods, Rose, we all have that instinct.” He rolled onto his side, folding his arms across his chest and letting his head lay awkwardly on the jacket. “But, like everything, it’s a fleeting desire.”

She blew out a breath but kept her eyes upward.

“If I’d resent anything,” he admitted. “It would be you not giving me the chance.”

She rolled her head to look at him, but still didn’t speak.

So he continued onward keeping his voice even and quiet. “I’m _here_. Your first Doctor is _here_. Thete, the one who loved you enough to marry you and start a family, well, he’s here too.” He tightened the fold of his arms against his chest. “They never left you, Rose. We’re _here_. We’re _all_ here.” He exhaled and drew in a deep breath. “All of them inside one man who is _here_ , and who doesn’t want to go _anywhere_ and leave you alone ever again.”

He watched a tear roll down over the bridge of her nose and drip to the silken lining of his coat. He held off wiping at it, but only because he was desperately trying to rein himself him and felt that loosening the fold of his arms would force him to shatter into a hundred pieces.

“I’m scared,” she said after a moment in a voice so weak and timid it broke his hears to hear it.

“Scared of what?”

“Scared of how much I love you,” she admitted. “And how much I need you.” She inhaled a wet sniff and brought up a hand to her eyes to give them a wipe with the back of her hand. “Something inside me broke when you were taken from me. I..” she shuddered in an inhale. “And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull myself together. Still can’t. You’re _here_ promising me everything I want and more, and I still can’t pull myself together, because I’m so damn terrified of what’ll happen to me if I let myself love you completely and then lose you again, Doctor.” She brought both hands to her face and buried herself inside them to shatter into the great gulping sobs she hadn’t been able to release since before he was taken from her by the Bad Wolf. “I’m not strong enough.”

He quickly released his hold of himself to snatch her in close to his chest. He held her shuddering, shaking, sobbing form against his chest. He tucked her head underneath his chin let his own tears fall into her hair. “You’re the strongest person I’ve ever met,” he vowed with a whisper. “Stronger than me, stronger than anyone.” Her head shook and she muttered in the negative. He clicked his tongue. “Yes, Rose. You are.” He drew in a deep breath. “By the Gods, Rose. What you accomplished, what you did…” He let out a long breath of utter reverence. “I speak eight billion languages Rose. Eight billion. And you know what, even if I take words from each and every one of those languages, there still wouldn’t be enough to express my pride and my gratitude for what you were able to do for my people.”

“I had to do something,” she whimpered. 

He let a chuckle rumble inside his chest. “Most people might take up knitting, drinking, cigarettes, or go out and have a multitude of pointless one-night flings.” He blew out a breath. “But you, Rose. _You_. You saved and supported an entire society of peoples. You welcomed them into your home and most importantly into your heart.”

“I had room in there,” she admitted softly. She had stopped sobbing by now, and now had her ear against his hearts. “You left a great gaping hole in there. I had to fill it with something.”

He pulled his head back with a slide of his chin on her hair. He lightly nudged at her forehead with his chin, and her nose, to bring their faces together. His eyes were on hers. “Now that I’m back,” he asked her gently. He pressed the flat of his hand in the centre of her chest. “Let me fill it up again?”

She chuckled despite her tears. “That’s corny, even for you,” she said softly.

“You should have heard what I came up with before that.” His smile fell. “But I’m serious about this, Rose. I know we’ve got some work to do to get ourselves sorted here. I know you still need to yell at me some more. I’ve still got some rather supreme grovelling to do to make up for being such a colossal twat…” 

She chuckled against his chest.

“But my hearts beat for you, Rose,” he vowed passionately on a breath. “And one day you’ll drop your shields, the ones in your mind _and_ the ones physically holding you back from me, and I’ll prove it to you.” He stroked his palm down her cheek. “You won’t ever be left with any form of doubt ever again just how deeply seated my love for you really is.”

“And you’ll see me,” she countered softly. “Might overwhelm you.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve been overwhelmed by anything,” he said with a one-sided smile. “I welcome it.” The smile fell. “You never have to hide yourself from me, Rose. Never.” A series of softly spoken Gallifreyan passed through his lips. Words that hadn’t been shared between them since the day he took her as his wife more than 450 years ago. As hoped, he felt her inhale sharply, stiffen, and then relax in his hold as he waded through the ancient request for them to share their minds as one. “So glad to know that still has the same effect on you now as it did back then,” he whispered with a smile against her mouth.

She slowly rolled onto her back on his jacket, coaxing him to roll with her so that his chest hovered over hers, and answered him with a softly whispered and flawless recital of her acceptance to his request. At the final syllable, she dropped the shields inside her mind and welcomed him openly.

A long moan of absolute and utter pleasure flew from between his lips as the feeling of her washed over him completely. He couldn’t have tried to suppress it even if he wanted to. It was a sound that swam across the grasses and up along smooth-barked tree trunks to be released into the air around them. His hand fisted at the silken lining of his jacket as he fought the urge to roll onto her completely. A battle that was lost the moment she tugged his Oxford from his trousers and pressed the flat of her hand against the bare skin of his ribs and belly, her touch fire against his cool skin.

Another long moan sounded out and the Doctor had to centre himself with a series of deep and controlled breaths. “By the Gods, Rose,” he warned her with a pant. “That is the exact opposite of what you should be doing if you don’t want us to…” He hissed through his teeth when her hands slid across his waist to claw at his back. “You have to stop,” he warned in a far more pathetic that firm tone of voice.

“I’ve dropped my shields,” she said to him through a tongue-touched smile. “Both of them.”

“ _Brilliant_ ,” he breathed through a smile. He lifted over her to settle himself on his knees in between the part of her legs, and with a tender, yet raking movement on his hands up the length of her legs, drew her skirts up toward her hip. He stroked at the tender skin of her thighs and looked down at her with a smile. “We can either take this into the TARDIS,” he offered. “Or we can make love under the light of Gallifrey. Your choice, because I’m pretty good with either option.”

“Might not be a real good time to make a joke about what the Time Lords might see if they take a look up into their own night sky right about now, yeah?”

He snorted. “And yet she makes one anyway, doesn’t she?” He lowered himself in between her thighs. “I hope they have their telescopes out,” he managed out reciprocally before dropping his mouth to lay claim to her mouth.

Rose shoved at the shoulders of his blazer, not so gently coaxing it off his shoulders. He groaned with annoyance when the blazer caught at his elbows and lifted up only far enough from her to get himself free of his. His mouth found hers again while he was still shaking the blazer off his right hand. His mouth was on hers for only a short moment, however, as when her hands slid up underneath his Oxford and left a searing trail of delicious heat up along his ribs he had to lift his head and howl out a long and desperate moan.

Rose hooked a leg around his hip, grabbed at his tie and pulled him back down to kiss her again. Together they rocked a gentle movement against each other, panting and sighing together. After a moment, he lifted his hip and looked down between them. His eyes lifted to hers with a light waggle in his brow in a request for her to undo his trousers and shove them down over his hips. No more coaxing and petting needed for him, he was more than ready for this. As her hands answered his unspoken request, he heard a rustle in the bushes beside them. 

His head lifted immediately. He braced one hand on the ground and lt the other one grab at her wrist to stop her from undoing his trousers.

“Doctor?”

He hissed silently to ask for quiet and very slowly moved off her. He wasn’t at all surprised when she moved as well, keeping to his side and looking curiously into the direction his focus was centred.

“What is it?” she asked him quietly in little more than a whisper.

“I don’t know,” he replied with equal quiet. “This planet has been completely uninhabited since the meteor strike two thousand years ago.”

“Are you sure?” she queried with light doubt and a little amusement in her voice. 

He flicked his head toward his ship. His voice was still little more than a whisper. “Did you want to head into the TARDIS? I’ll take a quick peek out here and meet you in there in a minute.”

“Don’t think so,” she whispered in reply. “If you’re here, then so am I.” She took a step forward, only to be pushed back behind the Doctor’s shoulder with a push of his hand. “Are you sure it wasn’t just the wind or something?”

“Can you _feel_ any wind?”

“Yeah, no. Can’t. Good point.” She pressed into his back and looked over his shoulder. “Should we just introduce ourselves, maybe?”

“Because _that_ always ends well,” he muttered. He did give a shrug, though, and straightened up. “But why not? Best of my knowledge, noone’s supposed to be here. Worst case, we end up with a space cat or something leaping out of the bush at us.”

“I really wish you hadn’t said that.”

He gave a grin into the darkness. “Hello!” he called out. “Sorry to intrude, but we thought this planet was supposed to be uninhabited.” His eyes refocused on the shake of a tall bush in front of him. “I’m the Doctor,” he called out. “And this is Rose.” 

“Hello,” Rose sang out with a smile and a light laugh in her voice.

The rustling stopped and the Doctor gave a huff of mild annoyance. He hummed to himself. “Well,” he sang to himself as he gave a scratch at his sideburn. “Guess it was the wind, then. Or something anyway.” He turned back to her. “See? Told you. Noone’s here.”

She walked around him and headed toward the brush. “Are you sure?”

“Quite,” he answered with a smile. “So. If you wanted to pick up where we left off, we still have the TARDIS as an option. She does have a wonderful rendering of Gallifrey that…” His words cut sharply when he heard a crack of woof and thicket underneath Rose’s feet. The woosh of leaves and the groan of splintering wood had his eyes widen in horror. He held out his hand. “Rose, come here,” he called out urgently. “Take my hand.”

Her eyes were wide on him and her face tightened with panic. She felt the ground as it gave way below her. she looked down and then up, a flare of terror widening her eyes further. She didn’t have time to reach for him, but she cried out his name when the ground gave out completely and she dropped fast into the pit below.

All the Doctor could do was throw himself forward and call her name. 

~~oooOOOooo~~


	5. Descent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor tries to keep his promise he made to Rose 450 years ago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This arc: Well. It serves a couple of purposes, one of which will be come quite clear as we wade through it (but not spoiling it). The other purpose is growth and understanding between our babies. Words really don't do all that much. Sometimes you need to see it rather than hear it. This is key here.
> 
> What can I say about this chapter? Not a lot, but please do give our lad a bit of the benefit of the doubt. He's going to need it.
> 
> Oh, and no... I am not triangling anything. Don't worry about that.

~~oooOOOooo~~

Gallifreyans were a deceptively fast-moving species. Deceptively strong. Deceptively fast. Deceptively clever. Add in a century or two at the academy to become a Time Lord, and they had a cognitive speed that would rival the travel of light across the vacuum of space. By the time that Rose had made it to the second syllable of his name, the Doctor already had a plan for rescue in his mind. 

The gravitational pull inside this planet was marginally less than the pull from the centre of the Earth. This didn’t mean that the final outcome of falling into a pit would any less fatal than it would on planet Earth. If anything, it would just make the ride toward death that much more painful for her to endure.

Which was absolutely not going to happen on his watch …

A slower gravitational pull gave him an additional, _maybe_ , 1.4 seconds to save her – which might be just enough additional extra time to keep his promise of always catching her if she was to fall. A scan of his eyes spanned little more than a microsecond and included a hard flick or his arm and the close of his long fingers over the thick, rubbery root of a fallen tree that extended toward where he could still see Rose’s entire upper torso and her flailing arms.

“I’m coming, Rose!” he cried out as he kicked the toe of his Converse into the root ball of the tree to shove himself forward. The kick provided him with a short and sudden additional burst of speed that had his upper body fully over the pit before her head disappeared into the pit completely. His fingers locked around the root with such strength that the thick skin of it popped and oozed out a particularly gross slimy substance over his fingers. He tried _really_ hard not to recoil from as his other hand sought purchase of his wife falling beneath him. His initial grasp yielded nothing. A hard kick and a tighter grip on the oozing root to keep him up and out of the pit, and he made another desperate grab. This time his hand clutched a thick bundle of soft and very tough Gallifreyan woven fabric.

No time for relief, he clutched hard and growled out a long sound of exertion as he felt the hard pull of Rose’s weight snap his shoulder tight. A last-microsecond flex of his bicep was all that saved his shoulder from pulling completely from its socket. He prayed to the big three Time Lord deities (even old Rassilon just for good measure) that the fabric wouldn’t suddenly tear and she’d fall from his hold.

“It’s okay, Rose,” he grit out through his teeth. “I got you, yeah? I got you.”

She let out a peep from below, but thankfully didn’t scream, nor panic. She was most definitely terrified, he couldn’t fault her for that, but she remained as calm as possible as she swung from his arm.

“I’m going to need your help,” he begged of her with a pant in his breath and a curl in his lip. The ooze might not be making his grasp slippery – if anything it was giving him a tighter hold – but it was the only thing holding him on this side of the hole. “Can you grab my arm?”

There was a mild stammer of fright from below, but she remained calm. “You – you can’t give me your other hand?”

“Yeah, not possible I’m afraid,” he answered her through his teeth, finishing with a couple of hissed breaths through his teeth. “It’s the only thing holding us here.”

“Oh – Okay,” she breathed out with far more calm than he could ever have hoped her to have. Gods, he loved this precious woman’s strength.

“Please, Rose,” he pleaded with calm urgency. “I really don’t know how much I’ve got in me to keep holding you like this. I need you to help yourself out of here.”

“Got it,” she answered with surprising calm and firmness. “Working on it now. Gimme a mo, yeah?”

“Yeah, sure, take your time,” he huffed out facetiously. There was a moment of slack against his hold, which made him yelp out and scrabble for a thicker grasp of her dress. “Rose!”

“Stop shaking about up there,” she huffed. “It’s okay, I’m able to reach the wall. Figure I could use the leverage to get a bit more, you know, secure or something. Save your strength for when I need you to pull me up.”

“Which should be now,” he argued through his teeth. “Come on, Rose. Please.”

She lifted her hand to clutch at his wrist. Her feet did find purchase on the wall, which seemed far too smooth to be a naturally formed wall. She let out a humph of curiosity as one foot slipped and flailed, which drew a growl from above as she jerked painfully at him. “Sorry!” she called up. Her apology shifted to a gasp of surprise when her flailing foot met with the pointed top of what she assumed was a spike inside a booby trap. Immediately, she pulled her foot up tight and let out a yelp.

“Rose,” he begged from above. “For the love of Omega, I need you up here.”

“Hold on,” she replied with definite curiosity in her tone. “Doctor, This. This isn’t natural.” She exhaled. “I thought you said there was no one here.”

“There isn’t,” he clarified with a tone shifting from fear to frustration. “Now if you would please concentrate on getting up here, I’d appreciate the effort.”

“But, Doctor,” she breathed out, her inquisitive nature shoving aside any fear she may have had. “This is man-made or something.”

He growled above her. “Rose,” he said with warning in his voice. “While this fearless and curious nature of yours is one of the things that has my hearts beat for you as they do. I very much prefer that you get all inquisitive when you are beside me and safe – not hanging inside a pit of doom with only the hold of my arm preventing you from falling to a very painful and unnecessary death.”

“Fine,” she muttered. She tightened her hand on his wrist and grunted as she walked up the wall and climbed up his arm. Within a short moment, her arms circled around his neck and she drew her face to his. She smiled at the relief in his eyes. “Hello.”

“Hi,” he grit out through a forced smile. “Now hold on tight,” he ordered her as his arm moved across her waist. “This is going to take some fancy work to get you up here.”

“I trust you,” she whispered out.

“I’m glad _you_ do,” he admitted as his head turned from her and he looked at the hand covered in ooze and grasping at the tree root. “Not out of danger yet.”

He closed his eyes, grit his teeth, and let out a long and loud grunt as he flexed his bicep and pulled hard at the root. She slid just slightly downward as the arm he held across her waist loosened just lightly, but with a roll of his back, he tightened the arm to lock across her back underneath her shoulder blades. With only one more long grunt that ended with a growl, he finally had her high enough out of the hole that she was able to scramble to safety.

He fell backward onto the lavender grass with a moan, both arms splayed out either side of him. “Gods, Rose. How have you survived this long being as jeopardy friendly as you are?”

She dropped to her knees at his side. There was an amused sound inside her panted breaths, and she leaned forward to press her hands into her knees. “One could ask the same of you, Doctor.”

He laid a forearm across his eyes and let out a breath, trying desperately to calm his breathing to a more manageable and less noisy level. “I haven’t,” he stated. “Barely into my second millennia and I’ve died ten times already.”

“Very morbid,” Rose muttered dryly. She crawled across the grass toward him and touched at his still heaving chest covered only with his crumpled and untucked oxford. “Thank you, Doctor,” she breathed out appreciatively. “For catching me… _again_.”

“Promised you I would,” he said gently. He lifted his hand to stroke the backs of his fingers down her cheek. “Or I’d go in there with you.” He didn’t realise that the hand he’d lifted to her was one covered in ooze. When she suddenly jerked back from his touch with a look of absolute disgust on her face, it took him a moment to work out just why that was. He looked at his hand with his own look of revulsion, and then flicked it off to one side. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“What is that?” she asked with a turn of her nose as she lifted her skirt to wipe the goo off her face.

He caught sight of the bare tops of her thighs and inhaled deeply. “Tree sap I think,” he said in a slightly strangled tone of voice as he turned away from the sight of her thighs and the soft blue triangle of her knickers at their juncture. He writhed on the floor just slightly and then looked up into her amused face. “So, ehm. TARDIS?” he asked with a flick of his head and a wink in his eye.

She hummed in the negative with a smile and a shake in her head. 

His brows shot up high, and he quickly levered himself up to a seat, his hands pressed into the grass behind him. “No? But I just saved you, Rose…”

“Which you did because you love me, right?” she said with a chuckle. “Not because you were looking for a shag in the TARDIS.”

He lifted both hands and gave a shrug as he lifted one hand and then the other like a scale. “Column A, column B.”

“I’m flattered, of course. But there are more important things on the go right now,” she said with an excited widening in her eyes. She flicked her ear toward the pit. “Over here.”

“Important to who?” he muttered under his breath. He watched her on her hands and knees leaning over the edge of the pit and let out a moan as he rolled himself onto his hands and knees to join her. “Rose. I just managed to get you out of there. Do me a favour, please, and don’t get too close again.”

She looked at him over her shoulder and then flicked her legs out behind her to lie on her belly at the edge. “Better?” she asked him.

“Marginally,” he answered with a sigh as he settled down onto his belly at her side. As much as he was feigning complete disinterest in what had gotten Rose all excited down there, he couldn’t help but slowly capture just a little of her enthusiasm. Rose didn’t get excited over nothing. He folded his arms in front of his face and dropped his chin onto his wrist, belatedly realising it to be the wrist covered in goo. His nose turned up as he switched his arms to be able to lean on the clean one. “What’s got you all excited then?”

“You said that noone’s been on this planet in, what, two thousand years?”

“About that,” he answered. His eyes lifted to look across the other side of the pit, and to the towering trees. “Life is slowly returning to the planet, but it’ll be a couple more thousand years before it can sustain any intelligent animal life.”

“I think you’re wrong,” she breathed out with a smile. “No, I don’t _think_ you’re wrong. I _know_ you’re wrong.”

Why she assumed that wouldn’t be insulting for him to hear, he didn’t quite understand. He tried not to show any outward offence other than a petulant curl of his lip and a roll in his eyes. “And how do you _know_ that?”

She pointed into the pit. “Because this isn’t a natural sinkhole or anything like that. This is a man-made trap.”

“Which is a couple of thousand years old,” he offered with a shrug. “The species that were here at the time of the meteor strike were hunters and gatherers, Rose. A fairly primitive species compared to your lot, of course. They hadn’t developed firearms capable of a kill shot from a hundred metres. Didn’t even have bows and arrows at that point.” He gestured to the pit. “They used traps like these ones to hunt their food.”

“Which explains the smell of death,” she said with distaste and a crinkle of her nose.

“Well no,” the Doctor offered. “After two thousand years any blood of meaty parts would have degraded and decomposed into, well, into nothing.” He shifted forward just slightly to poke his head into the mouth of the gap. He took a deep inhale through his nose, then shifted back to his original position. He then tasted the air with a flick of his tongue and swallowed. There was a frown of confusion on his face.

“What did I tell you?” she said with a smile. “That’s pretty fresh.”

“As fresh as rotten, decomposing flesh can be, I suppose,” he admitted. His lips puckered out in front of him as he considered it a moment. This was definitely an uninhabited planet. The Celestial Intervention Agency had it quarantined and marked abandoned and off limits fifteen hundred years ago. Noone was allowed here.

“And look at the…” She frowned at his side. “Oh yeah, you can’t.” She grunted and lifted up to her knees. “Gimme a mo.”

He flicked his head sharply toward her. “Where’re you going?”

“To get your sonic,” she answered him with a thumb over her shoulder as she slowly drew to a stand. “I think you’re going to need it to take a look.”

“I’d really prefer you didn’t wander off,” he suggested. “One wrong step and you’ll end up in another pit.” He looked back into the hole. “Best you stay with me right now.”

“You left footprints in the grass,” she sighed. “I’ll follow them back to the TARDIS, yeah?”

A smile stretched across his face. “The TARDIS,” he cheered. “Great idea, Rose. You wait for me in the TARDIS, safe, and I’ll join you in a minute.”

She huffed as she walked back to where his coat was still stretched on the ground. She picked that up, his discarded blazer and dug into the pockets as she walked back to him. “Here,” she said with slight sharpness in her tone as she handed him the sonic. “You’re not sheltering me in the TARDIS, okay? We’re here, together, like we should be.” 

“That actually sounds…” he sighed and smiled. “ _Brilliant_.”

“Better with two, yeah?”

“Oh yes,” he breathed out with a smile. “Absolutely, Rose. The stuff of legend back together.” He adjusted the settings on his sonic to a simple torch setting and lowered his arm into the pit. He gave a slight sweep of his arm to try and take in what lay below them. His eyes widened at the array of metal spikes and the smooth walls of a perfectly cylindrical pit. “By Omega,” he breathed out curiously. “This is not ancient, nor is it in any way natural.”

“I know, right?”

“But that makes no sense at all.”

Her eyes flared with excitement. “It doesn’t, does it?”

“Rose,” he said after a second in a voice that sounded apologetic and pleading at the same time. “I know that this trip was supposed to be a special little jaunt. Something just for the two of us, to talk and to reconnect…” he looked at her with his very best puppy-dog expression. “And I promise you that we will. That I’ll take you somewhere so, so special.”

She propped her head onto her hand and offered him a lazy smile. “But right now, there’s trouble afoot, and my very curious Time Lord wants to take a look.”

“Is that okay?”

She hummed to herself and lifted her eyes as though in thought. “Let’s see. If I said no and that I’d much prefer that we went back to the TARDIS and shared a bed for the first time in…”

“In four years, six months, three weeks and five days,” he supplied. “Ehm, not that I’ve been counting, mind. Just a ball-park figure.”

“Awfully precise for a ball-park guess,” she answered with lifted brows. She quickly shook her head. “If I was to make that suggestion, then you’d be far too distracted by the what-ifs down there and it’d be no fun anyway.”

“I really do beg to differ on that,” he remarked indignantly. “Perfectly capable of multitasking, thank you.”

“You have no idea the image I just conjured up,” she volunteered with a pinch in her brow at the mental image of him making love while sonicking together a gadget. 

“Yeah,” he drawled slowly, his face lengthening in horror at the image she provided him with though their bond. “Think I might’ve done, actually.” His brows lifted. “Not too sure how I’m supposed to take that.”

She shook the image from her mind. “But the mere fact you suggested that you can multitask while lovemaking really doesn’t make me feel all that focused on and revered.” She held up her finger before he could counter. “So that said – and really, I’m just as desperately curious as you are about this – we should have a bit of a looksee, yeah?”

“If you’re sure,” he confirmed cautiously with a pinch in one eye to properly gauge her expression.

“More sure than you are, apparently,” she said with a lift in her shoulders and a wide smile. She let out the tiniest of happy squeaks. “Oh, it’s been a while, Doctor. It’s gotto be wrong that I’m so excited about this.”

“Nah,” he drawled with a matching smile. “Just proves to me how right we are for each other, Rose.”

She pushed up onto her hands and knees and chuckled low. “Your brother says that to me quite a lot,” she admitted. “Of course, it usually isn’t because of something he’s particularly happy about.” She tipped her head to the TARDIS. “I’ll grab some ropes and harnesses from the old girl. You find a tree trunk that’ll hold the two of us.”

The Doctor gave a nod and flicked his still dirty hand off to one side. “Yeah, and one that won’t pop and exude filthy slime.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

The Doctor and Rose had their descender ropes and harnesses set up in far less time than either of them had expected to. Although having not worked side by side in years, they fell into very easy synch with each other. He found that he didn’t need to ask her to set up clips or pass him his sonic to help secure their ropes. A soon as the thought entered his mind, she had the item waiting for him.

He’d offered to wait for her to make a quick trip into the TARDIS to change out of her torn and dirty dress and into something a bit more appropriate for cave-diving. She’d refused the offer with a shake of her head and a stammer of undecipherable excuses on her lips. He felt his hearts sink just slightly to know that her refusal was born of her apprehension that he would leave and not wait for her. She didn’t outright say that to him, of course, but it was obvious to him that was the reason.

Somewhere along the line his beautiful, precious Human had developed separation anxiety…

…Probably three years ago in her timeline, 450 years ago in his.

He sighed to himself and gave her a smile as he set a helmet with a light on her head. He cupped both hands on her cheeks and gave her a firm and chaste kiss on her mouth. “Not going anywhere,” he vowed. “Not without you.”

Rose, he found, was remarkably adept at repelling down the smooth walls of the pit, which he immediately determined to be a purposefully molded, formed clay than dirt and stone. Once inside, he’d discovered that it was only a fairly short fall from the mouth of the pit. Not quite enough to have given Rose any real injury beside maybe a broken bone or dislocation if had been unable to reach her in time. That was, of course, if she was lucky enough to fall in such a precise manner as to not find herself impaled by any number of the long metal spikes that rose up at least three metres from the ground to point menacingly two metres from the mouth of it.

He held his hand outward to ask for her to pause as he noticed a marking on the wall. “Just a second,” he called to her. “Let me take a quick scan.”

Rose nodded and pressed her feet into the wall, her back up against one of the spikes, and checked calmly at her nails. The light of her helmet shone in his direction. “What do you think it is?” she asked after a second.

He held up his hand to shield himself from the light and used the other hand to scan the marking. “Not really sure. It’s not Eotune, I know that for certain. Their markings and written language was more harsh; a series of strikes and hard edges.” He adjusted his own headlamp. “This. Well. It’s been pretty worn down over the years, barely decipherable, but what I can see it’s a more circular and looping style of text.”

“Bit like your Time Lord Gallifreyan,” Rose ventured with a shrug. “The one with the circles that the TARDIS uses.”

He angled his head to one side and let out a small humph. “Yeah,” he drawled quietly as he narrowed his focus a little. He leaned his back against a metal spike and secured himself more comfortably as he drew his glasses from his pocket. He narrowed his focus and tried to fill in the missing parts of the marking on the wall. “You’re right.”

“how’d you mean?” she questioned curiously with a light scuffle of her feet along the wall to move closer to him.

He pointed to the glyph on the wall, and it’s light and almost completely indent in the clay. “This is actually a manufacturer stamp.”

“Odd.”

“Very,” he agreed. 

“But I thought the species here were too primitive for things like fabrication and stuff?”

“They were,” he said quietly. “Barely made it out of the caves before they were wiped from the universe.” He exhaled sympathetically. “A fledgling species with so much potential to become something brilliant gone in the blink of an eye.”

“At the whim of a cruel, _cruel_ universe,” she sighed softly. She shifted her eyes to her hand as he took it in his and lifted it to press a light kiss against her knuckles. Her eyes then moved toward the glyph. “Did you work it out?”

“I think so,” he answered. He lowered her hand to between them but didn’t release his hold of it. “I believe you were right in suggesting that it looked like the circular language that we use within the Time Lord Society.”

Her brows lifted high and she moved forward to take a look, adjusting her lamp to provide the best lighting possible. “What does it say?”

He spoke a series of syllables that really meant nothing to her at all. Sounded more like a name than any kind of phrasing. She sat back against her harness and the giant metal spike behind her. “Guessing it’s a company name?”

He nodded. “Yes. A well-known contractor for the Gallifreyan military. Specialists in the fabrication of bunkers and safe houses.” He followed the infinite loops within one of the circles. “You might recognise this one. It’s the symbol of the Prydonian Chapter. This seal denotes that this group have been commissioned by the ruling house in council – which is typically a member of the Prydonian houses.” He pointed to another, smaller symbol underneath it. “That’s the seal of the Cardinal.”

“Brax,” she said curiously.

He shook his head. “Curiously, no.” He pursed his lips and brought his brows in tightly together. He folded his arms across his chest and narrowed his eyes at a Prydonian seal paired with a Cardinal seal that did not belong to his brother. “There are six Cardinals in council at any given time. One to represent each chapter across Gallifrey. There is never more than one from any chapter. Brax represents the Prydons – has for almost a millennium.” He huffed. “Well. He _was_ Cardinal. Not anymore.”

“I’m going to get that story out of you before we go home, Doctor,” she warned him. She quickly added a question before he could try and wriggle his way out of any explanation. “So this was built before him, then?”

He shook his head. “No. And that’s what makes this curious.” He pointed to another circle. “The temporal marking here suggests that this fabrication is a little under three hundred years old.”

“So it _is_ Brax, then?”

“No,” he drawled out on a long breath. “The seal here does not belong to my brother. It’s not even a Lord I recognise.” His breath drew in deep. “Oh hold on.”

“What?”

He gave her a quiet hush and brushed his fingers on the seal, hoping that by wiping away three hundred years of dust might give him a better idea. His breath flew out of him as it was revealed to him. “Phennea,” he breathed out on a long breath. “Well, I’ll be.” His head shook slowly. “Just what have you been up to, then?”

“Who is he?” Rose asked quickly.

“She,” he corrected on a low whisper. He bit at his cheek and then inhaled deeply. “Phennea, she was. Well. She was an … ehm … a _friend_ of mine back at the academy.”

“A _friend_?” she questioned curiously.

“Yep,” he confirmed while he swallowed. “Just a friend. A good friend. A ... ehm…”

“ _Girl_ friend,” Rose added for him. “And not in the way we say she’s a girl who happens to be a friend.”

“No,” he breathed out. “Not just a _girl who happened to be a friend_.” He gave her a sideward look. “You’re not going to get mad at me now, are you?”

“Why would I be mad?”

He scratched at his sideburn and then rubbed at the back of his neck. “Well. I just admitted to you I had a girlfriend back at the academy.”

“And I had two boyfriends before I met you,” she said with a shrug. “You weren’t my first love, either, Doctor. I already know you were a dad before we had Mark and Alirra, so I guess that means you were married before.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I was.”

“To her? To Phennea?”

“Ahhh, no.” His face tightened up with discomfort. “Phen and I really weren’t considered a good enough political match for marriage rites. Were forced to go our separate ways after graduation when we were paired with our house-selected spouses.”

Rose hummed out and she slowly nodded her head. “I see,” she managed out as she flicked at the release for her rope to let herself lower toward the ground. “I’m going to head down and take a bit of a look around.”

He let out a groan and released his rope, descending a little quicker than she was so that his feet would touch ground at the same time as hers. She was already unhooking her rope from her belt when he made it to the ground. “You’re upset, aren’t you?”

She looked up from her task and shook her head. “Why should I be?” She wriggled out of the harness and let it fall down around her feet. “But you seem to be somewhat out of sorts, Doctor.”

“No, I’m not.”

She lifted her brows at the way he said that. It was more a quiet question than a firm denial. “Wow. If you can’t believe it, Doctor, how can you expect me to?” A thought occurred to her and she gave him a look of wary question. “Do. Do you _want_ me to be upset with you?”

His eyes blew wide at that. “What? Do I want you to be…” he shook his head. “Rassilon, no. Absolutely not.” He held up a finger. “This trip was supposed to be about you and me, reconnecting and honesty and falling in love again. Not you finding out I had a girlfriend at the academy who broke my hearts.”

She shrugged. “kind’ve falls into the _honesty_ part of the trip, don’t you think?” 

“Still,’ he muttered on a whisper. “She’s my past. Gone now.”

He looked slightly lost and almost distraught, so she walked up to him and grabbed at the front of his Oxford. Without another word, she pulled him down for a deep kiss, quickly wrapping both arms around his neck. His arms immediately and tightly snapped around her back, drawing her up against his chest and lifting her to her toes. He pulled her into a searing connection of absolute and utter devotion that drew a sound of longing from deep inside her chest. It was a sound that made him smile against her mouth as he drew back from their connection.

“My hearts beat for _you_ ,” he assured her. “And _only_ you.”

She staggered backward a little and gasped out a breath as she fanned her face with a wave of her hand. “After a snog like that, Doctor. I don’t doubt it.”

“Still got it, then?”

She shook her head and circled her finger toward his harness. “Best you get that off, yeah? We have some exploring to do.”

“And some answers to find,” he agreed with a lift of his head toward a corridor that led from the base of the pit. He frowned as he quick-flicked his buckle to release the harness. It slid down his legs as he walked toward the corridor and he kicked it off with a shake of his leg as it finally dropped to his ankles. “Because no part of this looks right to me. None of it at all.”

She stepped up to his side quickly, increasing the speed to her strides to match the long stalking ones he took. “They’ve obviously got permission to be here,” she offered. “I mean, they’ve got the Gallifreyan council seals and all…”

“Obvious Forgery,” he growled with displeasure. “We already know that Brax was Cardinal when this .. this _whatever_ it is was built. So to hold a Cardinal seal denoting the rank to a Time Lady who has zero connection to the council at all…” He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “No.”

“Maybe,” she offered with light breathlessness at trying to keep up with his stalk. “You lot are all time travellers, yeah? Maybe this Fener woman…”

“Phennea,” he corrected.

“Yeah, okay. Phennea.” She finally stopped him walking by putting her hand on his arm. “Doctor. Just hear me out, yeah?”

He stopped and looked down at her. “I’m listening.”

She held both hands up and petted his chest. Her eyes were on his, locked and tight. “Brax isn’t Cardinal anymore. You told me that.”

He nodded. “Correct.”

“Then maybe your old friend – or _girlfriend_ – was appointed to that position in his place.” She swallowed and took a breath. “Time travellers, right? Maybe she approved this build in the future and had to send them into the past to get it completed so that it was ready, you know, quick?”

He cupped his hands around her neck and gave her a smile of adoring pride. “You’re brilliant, have I ever told you that?”

She looked up at him with a beaming grin. “So you think that could be what happened here?”

“No,” he answered quickly. His hands dropped from her neck and shifted into his trouser pockets. “Phennea was not made for council,” he stated firmly. “Like me, she wanted to break the Prydon mould and do something more worthwhile to the universe than just look over it, judge, and patronize it.” He looked to the ground. “It’s one of the things that brought us together, really. Our shared disdain for the arrogance and hypocrisy of council.”

“You and Brax must have some great dinner conversations,” she breathed out. “Does he know you think he fits that mould?”

“To a tee,” he confirmed. He shrugged. “So unless something really drastic has happened to change her entire outlook and opinion of a council position…”

“Regeneration?”

He slid his eyes to her and offered a tired look. “No, Rose. You know better than anyone that we don’t change _that_ much.”

“Oh yes you do,” she sang in a barely audible whisper.

“I’m sorry?” he challenged with a cup of his hand around his ear. “I missed that.”

“No, you didn’t,” she said with a sigh and a rub at her eye. “Look, Doctor. How about we have a look around, and I mean a _real good_ look around? I’m sure that if we put our heads together we can find the answer.” She gave him a smile and bumped his hip with hers. “Come on. Me and you, the old team back together.”

“Hope and Glory,” he said with an affectionate smile. “Mutt and Jeff. Shiver and Shake…”

With a wriggle of her shoulders, she said with a wink. “I’ll be Shake, yeah?”

He hummed a laugh against her ear as he walked around her and then took her hand in his. “Oh no, Rose. I’m _always_ Shake.”

She laughed as she curled around his arm and looked up his shoulder at him. “Oh, I’ve missed this.”

From behind them there was a loud snick and click of several large weapons being cocked and loaded. Rose lifted her eyes to his and let out a sigh. “Okay. Maybe not _this_ part.”

“Leave it to me,” he whispered to her. “Stay behind me, okay?”

He spun quickly on his heel, his face open with bright with a fully stretched grin across his teeth. “Well hello there,” he greeted a team of five men dressed in deep grey battle armour peering down at him through laser sights of some of the biggest guns he’d ever seen outside of the war. His hands flew up in front of him. “Ahh. Well. Yes. No need for the weapons. We come in peace,” he offered. He tilted his head to Rose in a silent request for her to signal surrender like he was.

“Just got a bit lost,” he continued with a lift in his lip and his shoulder. “We’re supposed to end up on Momagra to see the eclipse, guess we took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Right Rose?”

She gave him a weird expression and then shrugged. “Yep. Guess the GPS is on the blink…”

“GPS only applies to Earth,” he corrected with a whisper through his teeth still set in a smile. He then focused his attention back on the group. “So if you wouldn’t mind. You can put the guns down, really.” He kept his hands up but thumbed over his shoulder. “Just let me and my companion head back the way we came and we’ll be out of your hair.”

The group and their large weapons remained silent and on guard. Their weapons were locked and didn’t move even a fraction of an inch in the hands that held them – despite being heavy enough that there had to be a waver at some point.

“Ahhhh,” the Doctor breathed out after a moment. “I’m going to guess that you’re all in some form of holding pattern until you receive further orders from whomever sent you out here.” He shrugged and slid his hands into his trouser pockets. “Guess that means we wait.”

“What’s going on?” Rose asked out of the side of her mouth. “Are we going to be shot, or what?”

“I have no idea,” he answered with a smile. “None at all.”

“And you’re happy about that?”

“Happy we aren’t going to be shot right now?” he asked. “Yeah. Course. How couldn’t’ I be?” His eyes lifted to a shadow that walked along the wall. Tall and lean, it obviously belonged to the person who’d sent out these armoured brutes. Brilliant. Hopefully it was someone he could smooth-talk into letting Rose go. “Here we go,” he whispered to her. 

“What?”

“Someone’s coming,” he answered. “Hopefully someone who…” his words caught in his throat and his eyes widened as he felt the very familiar presence of someone he knew so so long ago approach. His hearts sank into his chest when she finally rounded the corner and strode in a movement so fluid she may as well have glided across the floor.

She stopped just in front of her line of guards and broke out into a wide smile. “Well, I’ll be,” she sang out with a laugh. “If it isn’t Theta Sigma. Here, in my little cavern.”

He looked toward the guards and tried to will them to just shoot him where he stood. A single shot from each of them should exhaust his regeneration cycle well enough.

At his side he could feel Rose look up at him. He didn’t have to look at her expression to know that it was both questioning and worried. “My hearts, Rose,” he assured her quietly. “Remember, they beat for you. Only you.”

“Why is that important for you to tell me right _now_?” she asked worriedly.

The answer came not from the Doctor, but from the woman wearing what looked to be the tightest catsuit-style outfit she’d ever seen. The woman strode quickly up to the Doctor and cupped his cheek in her palm. “And look at you,” the woman purred. “Still as beautiful now as you were back at the academy.”

“Hello Phen,” he huffed out. The hands he held out in front of him firmed up and hovered near Phennea’s shoulders, ready to give a shove if necessary, and which he feared it just might be. “Long time, no see.”

She hummed inside a smile and took a step closer toward him, drawing in an appreciative breath of him. Without a further word, she cupped her hand behind his head, pulled him toward her, and claimed his mouth with hers.

~~oooOOOooo~~


	6. Phennea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Doctor and his old Academy girlfriend catch up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short one today, sorry ... tonnes of stuff came up that I had to deal with. 
> 
> This probably doesn't start out as any one of you might expect - probably doesn't even halfway head there as it moves on, either. But I hope it's acceptable at any rate.
> 
> Why does this head in the way it is? Just trust me, I say... trust me. Please.
> 
> Hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

There was a very big part of Rose Tyler that wanted to puff up her chest, let out a growl, and lay a territorial show of such a magnitude that it would be felt clear across the entire universe – across all space and time. The smaller and more rational part of her wanted to hold back, observe, and just see exactly where the Doctor was going to take this sudden – and admittedly very beautiful – threat to their marriage.

Territorialism vs rationality. Well, one was a difficult beast to contain for sure. The other, small and timid to behold, was actually one not to be reckoned with by any _one_ or any _thing_.

She held her hands together in one very tight fist down low in front of her and grit her teeth tightly to see in just which direction this was going to go.

A quick flick of her eyes toward where the two Gallifreyan ex-lovers were joined, and Rose could see quite plainly that it wasn’t headed anywhere near where this woman wanted it to go. The Doctor was stoic, still, and there was a clear sizzle of anger in the glare he held on Phennea’s closed eyes. The high seat of his shoulders, the way they held back to hold him taller than his usual slouch would allow, didn’t show any immediate desire to finally push forward at the hands held flat upon the woman’s shoulders. No. He clearly wanted her to feel how very cold and unresponsive he was capable of being before he finally gave her the hard shove to get her off him. 

A warning along their shared bond as the telepathic guard began to waver with caution, and the lengths of his fingers on her shoulders tensed and splayed. There was no need for them to lock and make the push, however. Phennea released his mouth with a small breathy sigh and levered herself back just enough the be able to speak across his lips.

“Well,” she remarked with a smile. “If I was a lesser species…” her eyes flicked toward Rose standing just slightly backward of being directly at the Doctor’s side. “...Like a _Human_ …” She looked back to him. “I just might have gotten one of those cold-stimulus headaches.” She hissed out a sound against his lips. “You’re like _ice_.”

He didn’t speak anything of a vocal nature. The glare in his eyes, however, spoke volumes.

She petted his shoulders and shook her head as she took a step backward. She didn’t look up into his face, rather, she kept her eyes on her hands against the pinstripes between her fingers. “My recollections of you during our physical affection was that you were always fire and passion.” Her eyes finally lifted to his and her mouth wore a light smirk. “Clumsy and over eager at times, yes…” She winked. “But _always_ eager.”

“I’ve changed,” he said flatly.

“Yes,” she agreed with one last pet at his shoulders. “I can see that.” She took a step backward and looked him up and down as her hands met with her hips. “Can’t say I wholly disapprove of this roguish new look of yours. So imperfectly … _perfect_. Just how long have you been this you, then?”

“Irrelevant,” he breathed out slowly. There was definite annoyance in his voice and posture. It was a wonder to Rose how this woman didn’t see it … or didn’t quite care enough for it to matter to her.

“Not really so irrelevant,” she said with a sigh and an upward tip of one shoulder to come close to meeting her ear. She let the shoulder fall back down to level and turned to her grouping of soldiers. “You can all stand down. He can be trusted.” Her head flicked back to him. “You _can_ , can’t you?”

“Trusted to do what, exactly?” he queried with much less hostility in his tone.

“Not rampage through the corridors here yelling “Exterminate” for one.”

Hostility fled toward curiosity. His brows lifted and his head tilted in an almost friendly manner. “Had a bit of a problem with that, then?”

“Not since we landed here two and a half centuries ago,” she answered with a shrug. “Though it doesn’t exactly seem out of the realm of possibility that the war will head in this direction at some point. Must be prepared for that eventuality, mustn’t we?”

“Not anymore,” he breathed out almost inaudibly as he finally broke position and slid his hands into his trouser pockets to take a bit of a look around. “Guess you didn’t hear that the war is over.”

Gasps of surprise filled the room, which drew the Doctor’s head from its upward surveillance down to look at the soldiers. He gave them a wide grin. “That’s right boys and girls. The war is over. Time to go home.”

“Did we win?” Phennea asked breathily.

He scratched at his sideburn and winced as a discomforted sound rattled past his lips. “No one really _wins_ a war, do they? But yeah, I guess you can say that Gallifrey came out on top.” His lips puckered just slightly before he felt the need to amend that. “Well. To a small degree at any rate. The Daleks are gone, but much more needs to be done to reclaim Gallifrey for her people and return our society to what it was before the war.”

“Before Rassilon, you mean,” Phennea offered with a sneer. Behind her there were snorts of agreement. She held up her hand to silence the murmurs. 

His head tipped to one side and his eyes narrowed somewhat. “Is that dissent toward the resurrected one?” he queried almost gruffly. “From a descendent of his.”

She rolled her shoulders with indignance. “I’d much rather not let that be too widely known, Thank you.” 

“As you were loomed in the Great House of Rassilon, Phen, I would think it obvious.” He rubbed at his jaw with his thumb as he began a slow walk around the somewhat cavernous room they were in. “So. Two hundred and fifty years?”

Her eyes slid to him. “Here, Thete? Yes.”

His head lowered to hers and his friendliness vanished. “I don’t go by that name anymore.”

She hmphed an unpleasant sound. “Last I heard you weren’t going by your other name, either. What was it? _Doctor_?” Her head shook slowly. “Still undecided on who you are, then?”

Rose entered the conversation at that juncture. Her voice was firm and unwavering. “He’s the _Doctor_ ,” she averred with her head held high with pride. “And he knows _exactly_ who he is.”

From the Doctor she received a pleasant smile full of reverence and thanks. From Phennea she received a glare of annoyance. She didn’t move toward her, but she did turn to face her. “I heard you’d been travelling with humans,” she muttered disdainfully. “Wish I could say that I believed the rumours and that I wasn’t surprised by it.” Her eyes raked up and down Rose’s torn and muddy dress, her mussed hair, and smudged makeup. “But I actually am. Quite.”

“Wow,” Rose breathed out with wide eyes and a chuckle in her shoulders. “Almost wish I could’ve jumped out of a cake to really surprise you.”

“Yes,” Phennea drawled long. “If I knew what you were alluding to, I might feign being impressed. As it is, I don’t, so you’ll have to excuse my non-reaction to your attempt at being clever.” She took three strides to stand in front of Rose. Taller than the blonde by almost a full foot, she looked down at her. “His current companion, I presume.” she asked flatly.

“You could say that,” she answered with a lift of her chin to try and match Phennea’s arrogance. “Been through it, me and him, and I don’t much like you talking to him like you are.”

Phennea’s brow lifted and a smile stretched across her cheeks. There was a lilt in her shoulders of utter amusement. “Oh by the seal of Rassilon, you’ve become taken with him, haven’t you? Love, as it would be termed on your planet.”

“I would hope so,” he murmured quietly without actually leaving his place several feet away. He swept his hand in the air to gesture between them. “Phen, meet Rose. My mate and bonded partner, mother of my children, and the holder of my hearts. Rose. Meet Phennea.”

“The ex,” Rose added with a sickly smile and a lift of her hand to offer to shake. “Yes, you’ve mentioned her, Doctor. Want to say it’s a pleasure to meet you, Phennea, but I’m not completely sold on that just yet. Don’t quite like you right now.”

“Well,” Phennea snorted and a smirk tickled at the very edge of her mouth. “You not a timid one, are you?”

“I’m _his_ wife,” she stated with a glance toward the Doctor that held for less than a heartbeat before her eyes shifted back to Phennea. “Gotto have a decent set to survive _that_.”

“That is very true,” Phennea agreed on an exhale. She finally took Rose’s hand in hers for a firm shake. “Well, then accept my apology for my familiarity with the old boy. Had I known his mate was present, I might have held myself in check.” She grazed a look toward him. “I am rather intimately aware of his views on fidelity.”

Rose’s brow lifted and when she inhaled to counter that comment with something that may have disagreed, she caught the Doctor giving a light shake of his head in warning. She closed her mouth and let her tongue settle heavily on her upper lip.

“Of course,” Phennea breathed out. “A soul-bond would certainly ensure the faithfulness he so firmly desires.”

Rose’s eyes flicked toward the Doctor; whose face was set in a very unhappy frown. There was obviously a story there that she would get out of him at some point. Her look toward him gave him fair warning of it, to which he lifted his eyes and let out a long sigh.

“So what brings you here, anyway?” Phennea said after a moment, her voice breathy and fairly disinterested to hear the answer to the question she posed. “I have to admit that the arrival of any ship on Eotune was a marked improbability, let alone a Gallifreyan one.” Her face hardened to an expression that held more interest. “You did arrive via capsule, correct?”

The Doctor finally broke from his stoic stand, and his entire demeanour shifted to his usual slightly manic posture. His hands in his pockets, he approached with a smile on his face. “Yep. Flew in by TARDIS.” He drew a hand from his pocket to rub at the back of his neck. “Wanted to take the missus on a quick trip. A date, if you will.” He stopped rubbing his neck but held his hand there. “Thought this planet was abandoned and might provide some much-needed privacy to reconnect under the stars.”

She chuckled. “Threw a Stalos Gyro in your plans for that, didn’t we?”

His eyes widened. “Oh, you wouldn’t happen to have a spare one of those, would you?” He thumbed behind him. “Lost mine some time ago. Haven’t been able to properly calibrate the Relativity Differentiator in my TARDIS since a minor incident on Redun knocked it just slightly out of synch with the governing circuit.”

Her eyes were wide at the request. Her answer was spoken slowly. “I think I might be able to locate one for you.”

“Brilliant,” he breathed out with a smile. “That’ll make the old girl happy.”

“I’m quite sure it will,” Phennea said slowly.

“So,” he sang out on a long breath. “Just how did you end up here, and,” he gave her a look of suspicion. “And just _why_ are you here?”

“If I tell you that,” she answered coyly. “then I’d have to regenerate you.”

“Oh, you have to be kidding me,” he stated flatly. “Don’t tell me you’re CIA.”

“It would go against the oath of any member of the CIA to tell you any such thing,” she replied with a shrug. “So sure. I’m not an Agent of the CIA, Doctor.”

“Why, Phen?” he sighed out sadly. “Why would you enlist with them? Gods, you’re the _last_ person I’d expect to become involved with that group.”

“Little other option, really,” she answered with her own quietness of sadness. “Once the war began, the work I was going within the scientific community became – in the eyes of council anyway – pointless.” She looked toward the entryway she had arrived from earlier. “Rassilon gave us the choice: Join the war efforts on the front line, or be recruited by the CIA to…” she blew out a breath and then swallowed hard. 

“To become agents of the most nefarious organisation ever to come out of Gallifrey,” he finished darkly.

“Who are the CIA?” Rose asked quietly.

“The Celestial Intervention Agency,” the Doctor answered with distaste and a curl in his lip. “Rassilon’s own personal shop of little horrors.” His eyes narrowed at the glare he received from Phennea. “Don’t even try and deny it, Phen. Reputations and legends always hold some form of truth to them – and there isn’t anything good to be said about any part of the CIA.”

“I’d be careful about making statements like that, Thete,” she purred out darkly. “There are more than a few negative legends being circulated about you across the universe.”

He smirked to one side. “All of which are probably true,” he admitted. “And, which is a responsibility I accept and the load I bear.” He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “I’m not going to hide by sneaky underhanded regulations and lies to cover up my truth.”

“So?” Rose interrupted quickly, trying to find a question to stop what looked to be an inevitable argument that might turn ugly. There were men with guns in here after all, and she had children she had to go home to. “Ehm. This CIA. Are they anything like the CIA on Earth?”

“Similar,” Phennea answered without taking her eyes off the Doctor.

“Worse,” the Doctor corrected, also without looking toward Rose. “Underhanded nefarious evil-deeders, who try to control history just enough to be beneficial to their purse holder of the day, but not enough to unbalance time itself.”

“That’s a very ignorant view of it,” Phennea growled out.

“Accurate, though, right?”

“We do what needs to be done,” she argued with a slap of her palm against her chest. “And we do good work for Gallifrey, Doctor. We’re not just the immoral, secretive group of interventionists you think we are.”

“Okay,” he breathed out with challenge in a voice falsely happy. “If that’s the case, then, tell me. Why are you here? What brilliant bit of work for the future of Gallifrey are you lot working on right now?” He dipped his head and gave her a forced smile. “I’d really love to know.”

“I can’t tell you that,” she breathed out.

“No,” he drawled out quietly on a long breath. “Of course you can’t.” He stood to his full height, his hands deep inside his trouser pockets. “So let me take a wild stab at it.” He strode around the room in a long heel-first stride across the floor. “And do feel free to stop me if I’m getting it wrong. You’re one of Gallifrey’s most renowned, brilliant, genetic scientists, top of the class at the Academy, even beating out Rani for the golden key. When war on Gallifrey breaks, you’re pulled out of the lab, shipped 250 million light years away from home to a planet deemed uninhabitable by – by the CI-bloody-A.” He paused his pacing to look at her. “How am I doing so far?”

Her arms folded across her chest. She waved one of her hands at him. “By all means continue, Thete. I’m fascinated to know just what else that awfully vivid and creative mind of yours has conjured up.”

“Oh I’m really not sure you want me to continue,” he cautioned her darkly.

“No,” she sang with her own decent level of darkness saturating her tone. “Please go on. This is getting fascinating. Tell me, Thete. What is it that they’d send a _brilliant_ geneticist two hundred and fifty million light years away from home in the middle of a war to do?”

“Genetic manipulation and experimentation,” he breathed out with sudden and devastating realisation. His eyes widened toward horror and he moved quickly toward her. “No, Phen. Please no. Tell me no, please.” When she didn’t immediately deny it, heartbreak inside his chest blossomed toward anger. His hands snapped up to clutch tightly at her upper arms. “You can’t do that to sentient species,” he started to growl and angry and low sound. “How could you? That’s coldblooded and just … _wrong_. So wrong.”

The slap that Phennea levered across his face was one with such strength and anger behind it that the crack echoed throughout the entire cavern. The entire top half of him was thrown to one side with the strike and he hissed through his teeth at the sting of it.

She leaned forward toward where he still hung low in his stoop “How dare you,” she seethed furiously through her teeth. Her inhale drew in as a hiss. “How dare you think I’m capable of such depravity. I have never, and would never, do anything like that.”

He still remained in his lean, seemingly almost too scared to raise himself back up lest she strike him again. The clench of her fists at her sides and the crackle of her ire were warning enough. He did angle his head toward her, though. “Well what am I supposed to think?” he ground out.

“Not that,” she answered angrily. “Rassilon, Thete. I thought you knew me better than that.”

“So did I,” he said with a twist of his head toward her. Slowly he levered himself back up to a stand. He was nowhere near his full height, falling into a low-shouldered slouch. “I thought I knew you, Phen. I truly did. Right up to graduation day when I found out I knew _nothing_ about you at all.”

Her ire fled completely at that moment. Disappointment moved in to take its place. Slowly she nodded her head. “I see,” she breathed out quietly. “You’re still mad about that.”

He said nothing, just slid his hands into his trouser pockets with his arms straight in an attempt to pick up his shoulders.

“That was more than nine-hundred years ago,” she murmured with frustration. “How many times can I say sorry for you finally forgive me?”

“I think we’re done here,” he decided firmly, not willing for this discussion to continue one word longer. He drew in a deep sniff and stalked forward toward Rose, who had thankfully remained quiet and unmoved by the heated discussion. He took her hand in his. “Come on, let’s go.”

“One mistake,” she defended as he passed by her. “One simple mistake...”

“Hardly simple,” he countered quietly. “And hardly just one.”

“A lot more simple than you think it is,” she argued. “And I’ll bet you’ve done it at least once yourself since, or if not, a man as passionate as you, and who holds as much magnificent fury as you do inside… It’ll happen to you as well.” Her eyes flicked toward Rose. “And when it does, I hope she’s far more forgiving about it than you are.”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “If it’s something I’ll never forgive, then why would I expect her to forgive me for it if I did the same?”

He looked down to Rose, whose eyes were now wide and curious as to just what this woman was talking about. She thought she might have a tiny bit of an idea, but with Time Lords and their sensitivities being somewhat less than those of her own kind, she really didn’t want to guess. “Doctor?”

“Not now,” he cautioned her gently and tightened the hold of his hand around hers. “Please, Rose. Not now.”

“But…”

“You had your Jimmy Stone,” he whispered through his teeth. “I had Phenneatryithdelphirassilonmas. Let’s just leave it at that for now, ta.”

“Oh,” she breathed out with a look over her shoulder toward the woman who seemed just as much distraught as he was furious.

“Thete,” Phennea called after him. There was resignation in her voice. “Please don’t go.”

He stood up straight and put on a facetiously overdone grin when he turned to look at her. “And why not, Phen? What kind of incentive can you offer me to stick around a little longer? Travel credits? Fuel for the TARDIS?” His smile fell. “What reason can you possibly give me to make me stay here a moment longer?”

There was a scream of terror from deep inside the corridor that grew louder with each thundering footfall of the terrified individual toward them. A young male dressed in a scarlet lab coat, his hair and face blackened with soot and green ooze burst into the room.

“My lady!” he called out as he tried to skid to a stop and only managed to stumble into a stagger. “Lady Phennea. I’m sorry to interrupt.” He panted and pointed a shaking finger toward the corridor. “But it’s happening again. We don’t know why, and we don’t know how to stop it.”

The Doctor blinked wide eyes toward the young man as he staggered further from the entrance and another yell sounded out from deep inside. “ Yep,” he managed to peep out in a tight manner. “That’s a good reason.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	7. Evolutions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The source of the scream is found, and the Doctor doesn't like what he sees

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not quite sure how anyone will accept this chapter.
> 
> All I ask, is that there are methods within my madness, and there's always a purpose to everything. I promise.
> 
> That's it for me for the week... see you on Monday.
> 
> I hope very much that you enjoy.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Rose Tyler’s mind very quickly supplied an offer as to just what was going to happen next. She didn’t even need to shift her face to look up at the Doctor to get a decent idea that his intrigue had been properly poked and that his seconds-ago firm vehemence to leave the site was now a strong desire to stick around a little bit longer.

“Go get ‘em, Doctor,” she breathed out quietly, her eyes still wide and locked on the poor hapless Gallifreyan lab tech who had lost an eyebrow and at least half a head of hair.

He took a step forward and turned completely to face her. One hand still held tight at hers, but the other came up to cup her face. There was an almost manic widening of his eyes when he spoke to her. “Are you sure, Rose? We can leave, _right_ now. Never look back. Let them work out their own problems.”

She leaned into his hand and gave him a lazy smile. “You know me better than that, Doctor,” she assured him. “And I know _you_ better than that.” She cupped his hand with hers. “This is what you do, you _help_ people. They need help.”

“But, they haven’t asked for it, yet.”

“Do they ever really ask?”

“Lady Phennea,” the lab tech panted out from behind the Doctor. There was panic evident in his voice. “We are going to need help to contain that.”

Still focused on Rose, the Doctor’s brows lifted, and his eyes softened with amusement. “And there it is.” His eyes rolled playfully. “Well. Close enough, anyway.”

“Works for me,” she said with a wide smile and a shrug. “So what’cha waiting for?”

He flexed his arm toward him to press a hard kiss against her forehead and then did a quick release of both her hand and her face. There was a smile on his face and a clap in his hands as he spun to face the lab tech. “Right. Help’s here. What seems to be the problem?”

The young man gave him a look of surprise and caution, and then flicked his gaze toward Phennea. “My Lady?”

“Ignore him, Cadet Glusmore” she huffed out in reply. Her calm made it clear that whatever was happening down the corridor wasn’t something that hadn’t happened before. “He’s leaving.”

“Well no,” the Doctor countered with a shrug in his shoulders. “That’s not entirely true.” One hand in his trouser pocket, the other held up in front of him, palm upward, his expression one of feigned nonchalance. “You did ask me to stay a while longer. The wife’s onboard with it, so we’re going to overstay that welcome a little.” He held out a hand. “ Hello. I’m the Doctor.”

Glusmore let out a huff of recognition. He looked at the proffered hand but didn’t take it. “Ahh. Yes. I’ve heard of you. Nothing of a complimentary manner, mind.”

“No,” he drawled as he pulled back his hand and ran it over his hair past his ear. His eyes shifted toward Phennea. “I’d expect not.” His eyes flicked back to the tech. “So? What’s happening…?”

A rumble and then a cry of a rather brilliant Gallifreyan curse from within the corridor silenced all of them. Glusmore let out a long huff and made a fast stride toward one of the guards and snatched his weapon from him. “Gimme that,” he snapped. “No more games, I’m killing the lot of them.”

The Doctor’s eyes widened and he quickly stepped forward. “Oh no. No. No. No. No. No. No. No,” he peppered out quickly. Both his hands were held high in the standard gesture to tell the man to think on it a minute. “Quite likely no need for that.”

Glusmore checked the settings of the gun and supported it on his hip. His eyes were fire toward the Doctor, who had taken position between him and the doorway. “Get out of my way.”

“Put the gun down, first,” he answered with a curl in his lip. 

“Oh, he’s not going to shoot anything,” Phennea muttered as she strode past the pair of them. “Cadet Glusmore drop the weapon. You don’t even know how to use the damn thing.”

“I can learn,” he argued even as he let the gun clatter to the ground.

“Come with me,” Phennea said smoothly. She looked toward Rose, who hadn’t shifted from the position that the Doctor had left her in. “And you, too,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t quite care just how much Thete trusts you, I don’t know you well enough to leave you unsupervised.”

“I could say the same about leaving you unsupervised around _Thete_ ,” she muttered quietly under her breath as she slipped her hands into pockets of her skirt and strode forward. She lit her face into a wide smile as she passed. “Thanks for the invitation. I’d love to see what you have happening here.” She held her hand out to the Doctor, who took it with a smile. 

He held her hand tight and firm to tug her a step closer, and didn’t relax the tightness of his hold as Phennea stepped up beside him and breathed out a short command for them to follow her.

“I’m going to assume by how calm you are right now, that whatever is going on in these tunnels isn’t something entirely unexpected.”

She shook her head. “Not to me at any rate.” She looked back to the hapless technician, who strode behind them with a fearful gait. “The cadets sent here by the council have short rotations between planets. They aren’t often witnesses to the … _evolutions_.”

“I’m going to get to the evolution comment in a moment,” he growled. “But I’m going to start with the fact you’re speaking plurally with regard to how many planets are involved in this,” the Doctor noted darkly. “Which leads me to assume that the operation you have here isn’t a one-off.”

“Twenty-nine planets in total,” she admitted. “All of them classified by the Celestial Agency as uninhabitable and off-limits to off worlders.”

“How very convenient that it’s the CIA that makes those classifications,” he muttered with a flick of his thumb along the bottom of his nose. “Makes it easy to hide their more nefarious mis-deeds.”

Phennea huffed out with annoyance. “There isn’t anything nefarious going on here, Thete.”

They paused in the doorway as a trio, the Doctor centred between the two women, and looked with horror at a laboratory practically destroyed. Half of the room was white and sterile, untouched and pristine. The other half, however, looked a disaster. The walls were blackened with soot, and small fires dotted the tables and floor. Concrete rubble and black and orange soil surrounded a cat’s eye-shaped crack in the wall. Green, oozing sludge, not unlike the substance that had covered the Doctor’s hand during his rescue efforts with Rose, leeched slowly out through the crack. There was the distinct scent of dirt, fire, burning electronics, and hair in the room. Of the three of them, however, only Rose seemed to be disgusted by the stench. She moaned out a sound of repulsion and covered her mouth and nose with the back of her hand.

“Oh, that’s disgusting.”

The Doctor’s eyes fell onto movement just outside the edge of the gaping open wound in the wall. Any expression of surprise and shock on his face quickly lengthened into apology and pain to see a small creature battling to move forward across the rubble. It had a hairless, flesh-coloured, rounded body, with thin arms and legs with three articulations a piece. Large black eyes of an almond shape that took up at least two thirds of its face blinked in the brightness of the room as it pulled itself with only its arms along the floor.

The Doctor exhaled a long breath and shook his head. “Oh, you poor, beautiful thing,” he crooned out softly as he let go of Rose’s hand and walked into the room to properly assess this struggling creature.

“Don’t touch it,” Phennea demanded hotly in warning when he crouched next to it. “The venom it secretes when injured is fatal to Gallifreyans.” She exhaled a breath. “We haven’t been able to synthesise an antidote as yet.”

He didn’t move back at all from the creature, that really seemed to take no notice at all of his presence. He was definitely annoyed, and his voice took on a very petulant, and mocking tone. “How dare you, Thete. How dare you make an accusation about us conducting genetic experiments on sentient creatures. Despite the evidence proving otherwise, we’re completely innocent, us CIA Agents, so here’s a regeneration resounding slap across the face for daring to question our motives…”

“By Omega’s robes you can be a condescending arse,” she snarled in reply. “You would have made a perfect council member. You and your brother, both, sanctimonious, patronizing, self-righteous idiots.”

The Doctor slowly rose from his crouch and levered into a forward stoop to admire the creature from a much safer distance. He rubbed his hands on his thighs and then pressed his hands onto his knees. “My brother’s condescending manner didn’t seem to sway you in any form of negative direction, if I recall it correctly.” His eyes then shifted toward her with a furious flare in them. “After graduation, I didn’t qualify for a council position, did I? You made damn sure of that.”

“ _You_ chose your path, Thete,” she argued hotly. “Don’t you dare blame that on me. I had nothing to do with it.”

He rose up tall and fired a glare toward her. “You had _everything_ to do with it,” he yelled with a punch of his fist downward at his hip. “I should have graduated with honours – with _distinction_ – but because of you, I barely scraped though.”

“That was your choice,” she snarled.

“Because of the vow you made to me,” he accused. “The pact we made, _together_. A promise that you never had any intention of keeping.” His lips curled up and he looked at her with disdain. “Just how long did you and Koschei make it before you betrayed him as well?”

“Don’t bring him into this.”

“Why not?” he challenged. “He was in the thick of it from the beginning, wasn’t he?”

“My God, you two!” Rose finally snapped out with a huff of frustration. “Give it a rest.”

The Doctor’s attention snapped quickly toward his wife. His expression was one of shock and embarrassment. Phennea’s expression was much more hostile. “How dare you,” she growled with disgust.

“Don’t you _how dare you_ at me, little Missy,” Rose said with a growl she usually reserved for when her two children decided to get into it and spar against each other. “It’s clear that the pair of you have some unresolved issues that need to be aired, but _now_ is not the time to be doin’ it.” She pointed to the creature that was making a lumbered slippery crawl toward her. “In case you’ve both forgotten, we’ve got mutant creatures here that has the ability kill everyone in this … this base, or _whatever_ it is ... just by sliming them, an’ the two of you are fighting like a pair of children.” She spread her arms out either side of her. “So, both of you. Separate. Now. Opposite sides of the room until you can grow up and act like actual, real, responsible adults.”

“Rose…”

She held up her hand to him but didn’t look in his direction. “I mean it, Doctor. Not putting up with this constant bickering.” She dropped into a crouch as the creature made it to the low edge of her skirt. “What’s in the venom that makes it so deadly.”

“Rose, please get back from it,” the Doctor warned. “It’ll kill me if I have to grab it away from you.”

She looked to Phennea. “The venom. What is it?”

Phennea recited a series of syllables in reply, words that Rose had never heard before. She looked toward the Doctor with brows high for translation. “Guessing you know what that is,” she said with a sigh. “Is it dangerous to me?”

“Acetic and salicylic acid,” he answered with a slump in his shoulders and a lift of his eyes to the ceiling. “Really? Aspirin?”

“Right,” Rose muttered. She reached forward and pulled the slimy, struggling creature up off the floor. She still held it underneath its arms a cautious distance out ahead of her, rather than pull it into her chest for comfort. It didn’t seem to struggle against her, instead it blinked impossibly large back eyes at her. the blinking of its eyes slowed and finally stopped. The large head dropped forward and the creature stilled completely. “Did. Did I just kill it?”

The Doctor slipped on his glasses and then settled his hands into his pockets. He moved around Rose and the creature, being careful to keep his distance as he analysed it though pinched eyes. “It’s dead,” he confirmed. “But I don’t know that it was because of you, necessarily.”

“No, Human. It’s not your fault,” Phennea remarked after a sigh. “They never survive much past three or four metres inside this lab.”

The Doctor flicked quick attention toward her. “By _they_ , you mean…?”

“That this isn’t the first appearance of a creature like this.” She looked up to the crack in the wall, which was wide enough at its widest point to allow any one of them through it. “And it won’t be the last.”

“When you say _appearance_ ,” he questioned again. “These aren’t genetically modified creatures, are they?”

“They aren’t,” she confirmed with a curl in her lip. “They’re what we here are calling the _Evolutions_.” She exhaled. “Not a pretty name, I’ll admit.” She looked to the creature Rose still held at arm’s length with a wince of disgust on her face. “But they’re not exactly a pretty creature.”

“I don’t know,” the Doctor breathed out appreciatively as he took a closer look at the glistening open eyes of the dead creature. “It’s quite remarkable looking, really.”

“If you ignore that it’s got an extra set of elbows and knees,” Rose remarked with curiosity as she shifted the creature left and right and took in the structure of its arms and legs. “It’s kind’ve cute. If not a little slimy looking.” She looked to the Doctor. “Mark’d love this thing. Imagine the ways he could torment Aly with it.”

“Wouldn’t last a day,” he said with a shrug. “It’d get eaten by the wolves.”

“They’ve got more discerning taste than that, Doctor,” she said with a smile toward him. She looked back at it. “Besides, they’re Gallifreyan, this would be poisonous to them, yeah?”

“Probably,” he admitted with a rub at his jaw. He took off his glasses and looked back to Phennea. He spoke as he walked toward her. All his anger had fled, and now he oozed with curiosity. “So, these creatures, these _Evolutions_ , they’re native to Eotune?”

“They are,” she said with a nod. “Well. At least they would have been the native species in around two thousand years or so.”

His brows pinched tight. “I’m not sure I follow. If they’re expected to be the evolved species a couple of thousand years from now, why are they appearing now?”

“Probably something to do with the work they’re doing here,” Rose supplied as she set the creature down on a table. She wiped her hands on a paper towel.

“Please wash your hands properly,” the Doctor begged of her with a voice of distaste. “Get rid of all of that venom from your hands. I’d really hate to get poisoned by you if I decide I need to hold your hand in the near future. And face it, the probability of that is quite high.”

She smirked and held her hands up in front of her, waggling her fingers. “Don’t tell me I’ve found an effective Time Lord repellent.” She chuckled and looked at her hands as she walked to a sink. “Should bottle it and market it to the Solurians, Sontarans, Daleks, and the like. Make a mint.”

“Scrub yourself really well,” The Doctor reminded her as he carefully watched the way she washed her hands. “Twice and three times if you have to.”

“I’ve been working in medical for more than a year, Doctor,” she reminded him with a sigh as she used a brush to scrub underneath her nails. “I know how to wash up, thanks.”

He gulped and looked back to Phennea. “So. Getting back to task. Rose made a good point about the early arrival of these Evolutions being due to what you’re doing here.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Is she right?”

“Your mate is smarter than you are, it seems,” she answered with a nod and a roll in her eyes. “Of course it is. Why else would a single-cell organism evolve to a multi-cell organism in less than three hundred years.”

“Just what are you up to?”

She walked toward a computer terminal set at the side of the lab which was untouched by whatever explosion had rocked the other side of the room. She didn’t take a seat on the high-top stool at the terminal, instead choosing to stand at the bench and type in her login access codes. “When I told you that the CIA was doing good work for Gallifrey, I wasn’t jesting or making excuses.”

He stood beside her, slipping on his glasses once again. He leaned down to watch the movement of her cursor as she moved toward the appropriate files needed to make her explanation. “Good work for Gallifrey doesn’t always equate to good things for everyone else,” he remarked. “Which is what oftentimes makes what your group do so dastardly.”

“Dastardly,” she said with a chuckle under her breath. “haven’t heard that word since Borusa’s lectures back at the academy.”

“Please let’s not bring that up,” he huffed. “I may be a Lord of Time, but that doesn’t make time outs given by an angry wife in any way appropriate.” He exhaled. “And I truly wouldn’t put it past her to follow through on that threat.”

Phennea pulled back from the keyboard and gestured toward it with her hand. “When the twenty nine scientific vessels were dispatched from Gallifrey two hundred and fifty years ago, we were sent out across the cosmos, toward any planets with a similar atmospheric, and elemental composition compatible with Gallifrey.” She stepped back when the Doctor pulled across a stool and sat in front of the monitor. She admired the profile of him as he leaned down with one hand on his jaw while controlling the mouse with the other. His focus was relaxed, yet very tight upon what he was reading. “You truly are beautiful, Thete,” she breathed out.

“It looks like you were sent here for research into acceleration of terran rehabilitation,” he remarked curiously, completely ignoring her comment. He looked at his hand over the mouse to think a moment, and then turned back to the monitor. His fingers began a fast movement across the keys. “Prior to the end of the war Lady Qantilmiarilan and her team were been working on something along a similar vein.”

“Lady Qantil,” she breathed out with familiarity toward the name. “From the Arcalian Chapter.”

“That’s the one,” he murmured distractedly.

“Yes, I’m familiar with her work.” She leaned an elbow on the counter beside him. “The cousin to Milvo of…”

“Yes, I’m aware of Mivlo,” he said with a sigh. “He’s the reason that I was recruited by the CIA back in my second.” He curled the hand he held under his chin into a fist. “And the reason I know just how underhanded and illegitimate CIA actions can be.” He blinked slowly. “I don’t judge based on rumour and reputation, Phen. I speak only from experience.”

“I never knew that,” she admitted.

“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” he replied smoothly.

Rose appeared on his other side. “Lot I don’t know about him, either,” she said with a shrug. “Pretty much a closed book, this one. Very good at avoiding any topic he doesn’t want to talk about.”

“That’s not entirely his fault,” Phennea defended quietly. “Part of the brainwashing at the Academy is to be as tight-lipped and mysterious as possible.” She sighed. “Stone cold and emotionless.”

“Not the Lords and Ladies I’ve met,” Rose corrected with a rise in her brow and a somewhat sympathetic look on her face. “Full of passion, all of ‘em. ‘Specially him and Brax.”

“Please Rose,” the Doctor breathed. “Can we stay focused?”

“Sorry,” she said with a slight wince. She thumbed behind her. “I might go explore a bit. That okay?”

“No,” the Doctor said quickly. “It’s not.”

“Your mate is safe to explore,” Phennea offered. “There’s nothing here that can be of any danger to her at all.”

He had to laugh at that. “You’ve never really met my wife, have you.” He swept his finger over his head between the two of them in a fresh new round of introductions. “Phen, meet my mate, my hearts, otherwise known as the most jeopardy friendly creature in the universe.” He frowned at the screen ahead of him. “So no. There will be no exploring for danger-courting Humans, thank you. No wandering. No leaving my sight.”

“Party pooper,” she whispered against his ear. “Takin’ all the fun out of it.” She lifted to a stand and gave Phennea a wink over the top of the Doctor’s head. “I’ll just go settle myself in a corner and play Candy Crush on my phone. Good with you, Doctor?”

“Perfect, thank you.”

Phennea watched Rose whip her phone out of a pocket on her skirt. She opened an app and started to walk in wide twirls and circles in the lab, each of which took her a little closer to the split in the wall. “Your mate. She’s not going to listen to you on this, is she?”

He grinned but kept his fist on his chin. “Absolutely not. One of the things I love so much about her, Phen, is that my Rose has a curiosity and bullheadedness that rivals my own.” He suddenly jutted a thrust of his arm toward the split in the wall. The thrust of his hand startled Phennea, who had to take a step back from being hit by it. “Stay away from the big nasty crack in the wall, Rose. At least for now. You and I can hold hands and skip across the threshold of it when I’m finished here.”

“How’d you…?”

“180-degree peripheral vision,” he answered without looking her way. “And eyes in the back of my head.”

She hmphed. “Can I at least go pee?”

“Not through the crack, you can’t,” he answered her.

“That almost sounds like a challenge.” She thumbed to the doorway. “I’ll get two-face here to take me to the local facilities then, yeah?”

“My hearts beat for you,” he called out almost distractedly as he folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his chair. He smiled at the return of his affection from the doorway. The smile fell quickly into an unhappy frown. “I think I see your problem.” He turned his head to her. “All of your calculations and experimentations are specifically designed for Gallifreyan conditions. No accounting for atmospheric and terran variations of your host planet.”

“Well, we’re trying to accelerate the repropagation of Gallifreyan lands and waterways,” she said with a huff. “Not rehabilitate and re-establish these planets.” She petted the space between her hearts with the flat of her hand. “We do this research and experimentation for the survival of Gallifrey post-war.”

“Again, I find myself having to point out that just because you think you’re doing good for Gallifrey, doesn’t mean the work your doing isn’t negatively affecting another species.” He let out a huff. “You called me ignorant, Phen, but the truth of it is, you are. You and the whole of the CIA.” He rubbed his hands down his face. “Gods. I’m sick of the collateral damage created by our people.”

“Its an uninhabited planet,” she argued. 

He thrust his hand toward the dead creature on the table only a few feet away from them. “It obviously isn’t.”

“It was when we arrived,” she argued. “How were we to know that our research and experiments would accelerate mutation and evolution of single celled organisms swimming in sludge?”

“How couldn’t you?” He gestured to the screen. “You’re trying to accelerate genetic mutation and growth to expedite rehabilitation on Gallifrey. Here. On Eotune. What did you _think_ was supposed to happen?” He tapped at his temple. “Doesn’t take a genius to figure out that any such efforts will yield accelerated evolution from local species – single celled or not.”

“Fine,” she growled. “So what do you suggest, then?”

“Shut it down,” he ordered.

“No.”

His brows lifted. “I’m sorry?”

“You speak a few billion languages, Thete,” she answered him with a pinch in her eyes. “Give me your preference of any one of them to tell you _no_.” She moved in close to him and lowered her voice. “I’ve spent the last two hundred and fifty years of my life doing this research. Two hundred and fifty years away from my home, my people, and everything I know. I am not going to throw all of that away and make my sacrifices go in vain because you tell me to.”

“I’m not saying you have to start from scratch,” he offered. “The analysis, the work you’ve done here. It…” his brows lifted and his eyes softened with awe. He looked at her with pride and amazement. “It’s brilliant. _So_ brilliant. I will do so much good.” His awe fell off. “But you can’t do it here.”

“And just where am I supposed to continue my research if not here?”

He pursed his lips a moment in thought. “There is another outpost you an utilize,” he offered. “With like minded scientists who can share their own research with you. Their research, granted, is mostly theoretical, of course, but very sound.” 

“Where is this, then?”

“Earth.”

Her brows twitched together and she shook her head. “There isn’t any research facility on Earth that I’m aware of.”

He pursed his lips. “Yes, well just like the CIA, there are those of us that have secrets of our own.” He looked to the doorway as Rose returned with her escort. Both of them chuckling with amusement. He couldn’t help the smile that spread across his cheeks at how easily Rose was able to fit in and make immediate friends no matter where they went together. “Of course, I need to speak with my mate about it first. Not entirely sure how she’ll feel about me inviting yet another group of misplaced Gallifreyans to our home.”

“Your home?” she barked with a laugh. “Oh, you’re joking me, right? Cosy little environment, you, your wife and kids, and me all trying to coexist.”

He didn’t look at her, his eyes locked on his wife having a laugh at the doorway with a young man in a labcoat who was trying to explain the function of a device that looked, well, phallic. “Our home currently houses over 200,000 Gallifreyan refugees, soldiers, medical personnel, and scientists.” He finally looked at her. “You won’t have to coexist with my family at all. There is actually a very tight rule on just what parts of the home are accessible. Only approved Lords and Ladies have access to our living quarters. I can assure you that you won’t be one of them.”

“That’s not really much of an incentive,” she said flatly. 

“It’s either that, Phen, or I notify the Shadow Proclamation about what you’re doing here.” He turned to her with a look of warning in his eyes. “They will storm this planet, arrest you all, and take every little bit of research you’ve gathered over two and a half centuries.” The edge of his mouth tipped upward. “Not even the CIA are immune to their laws.”

“Where is your loyalty?” she hissed. 

“You’re really one to talk, aren’t you?” He let out a breath ready to put a halt on the argument that was about to brew between them. “Phen.” He paused and swallowed, and then looked toward the creature laid on the table. “This experimentation has to stop. Eotune needs to go back to a regular evolutionary path. An acceleration like this … Can’t you see that It’s dangerous to inject this world with enzymes and elements from a different world. What crawls out from the primordial ooze won’t be able to sustain its life on this planet. They’ll have evolved to adapt to another world, a different atmosphere, a different terran. Theyre dying before they have a chance to live.” He huffed out. “By the Gods, they’ve already evolved with a venom that will _kill_ a Time Lord.” His expression was one of horror. “How is that even possible?”

“They don’t know any differently,” she countered.

“But they should,” he argued with passion in his quiet voice. “They so absolutely should. Who are you, and who are we to take their right to _live_ away from them like that? We aren’t Gods, and it’s really time that the powers that be in the Time Lord society start to remember that.”

“Until Rassilon’s taken from power, that won’t ever happen,” she said darkly.

“Then take a stand,” he said with a smile. “Take it. Close up this facility. And send a great big stuff you to the Capitol. Tell old Rassilon and his band of merry little CIA idiots that they can take their orders and shove them I’ve got plenty of room in my TARDIS for all of your research, your computers, everything! All of you, come back to Earth with us.” He smiled and gave her a wink. “Just like old times, Phen. Remember how you, me, Koschei, Rani, Drax, how we worked against the _man_?”

“After watching the holo-vids you brought back from Earth about their protesting of wars,” she answered with a smile. “When your hair was long, you spoke in nothing but slurs and drawls about taking a stand against society, and you wore pelts in place of a vest, and Oh yes. Not a half decade I will ever forget.”

“It was fun,” he said with a smile.

“We were kids,” she argued. “Barely fifty years old. Thete, we’re almost twenty times that age now.”

“But,” he pleaded. “The message is still the same, isn’t it?”

She lifted her head to the ceiling and let out a sigh. He was right. Of course, he was. She’d made the same horrific observation a century and a half ago. Reporting it to the CIA had done nothing in terms of creating any kind of solution. Orders from the Capitol were clear: They were to continue their research and experiments, because their analysis had shown that the creatures evolving were considered non-sentient and therefore really didn’t matter. She knew otherwise.

“Fine,” she breathed out. “Speak to your mate. If she is receptive, I’ll shut this down.”

“Even if she isn’t, you’ll shut it down,” he warned her. “I’ll find you somewhere else to continue your research – even Gallifrey itself if necessary.”

“If you send me to Gallifrey, they’ll send me right back here,” she warned him. “With reinforcements to prevent you and the Shadow Proclamation from interfering.” She let out a long sigh. “Although I really don’t think that your mate will be in any way receptive to allowing me in your home.”

“You’d be surprised,” he said with a warm smile that he shifted toward Rose, who was now in friendly conversation with three lab technicians and two guards. “There really is no bigger heart in the entire cosmos than Rose Tyler’s.”

“It’s not the size of the heart, Thete,” she warned him. “It’s the level of trust she has in you.” She looked at him with a tilted head. “And just how much does she have in you?”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	8. Opening Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose forces the Doctor to open up about Phen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Angst ahoy ... just a warning.
> 
> Hope you had a great weekend. Hope you enjoy this wee offering today....
> 
> Next chapter will be much lighter and angst-less, I promise.
> 
> Yes, I know that Rose is being difficult and some might say annoying here, but I think she's justified in it. Again, there is method to all of my madness, people ... trust me...

~~oooOOOooo~~

Rose Tyler was discussing the benefits of a shaven head to the young lab tech who’d lost at least two thirds of his hair when the Doctor approached her. His face was a wide and excited toothy grin that only widened further when he extended his arm to her and encouraged her to take a look. Her eyes did drop and widened a little with curiosity to see a scarlet-red booted jumpsuit draped over his arm. His other arm supported a hood with a rigid clear plastic visor, sharply angled into a wide U-shape. It clear that he was holding a Gallifreyan-type HAZMAT suit … particularly as he was wearing a matching one himself.

Her eyes flicked up to his. “What’re you up to, then?”

“You mean ‘what’re _we_ up to’, Rose,” he corrected with a thrust of his arms toward her. “I want to have a bit of an explore of the world on the other side of the big gaping hole in the wall. Figured you might like to join me.”

“So you can keep an eye on me?” she said with a smile as she took the garment from his arms. She didn’t bother hesitation before gathering up her skirts and stepping into it.

This would usually be the point where he might scratch at his sideburn, rub the back of his head, and try to backpedal or lightly accuse her of having little faith in him. But as he chose to assist her in getting the outfit on over her long flowing skirt, he settled with a drawing recital of one of his favourite four-letter words instead. “Well, I wouldn’t like to lie to you by saying otherwise.” At her upward look through her brows at him as she wriggled the suit up her legs, he gave her a smile. “Oh come on, Rose. We were only on the planet for ten minutes before you found trouble…”

“At least a half hour,” she corrected. “And had you not gotten intrigued by a rustle in the bush, then…” her eyes widened and she shook her head. “Nope. Scratch that. If you hadn’t gotten distracted, then we probably would have gotten ourselves into a lot more trouble than me almost fallin’ into a pit.”

He held the back of the suit to help her slide her arms into the sleeves. There was a pinch of something unreadable in his eyes. “I’m not entirely sure how to interpret that comment. My recollection is that we were heading in a rather pleasant direction…”

She wriggled her shoulders into the suit and then reached down to the crotch of the suit to pull up the zipper to her throat. “You’re not the only one that can be described as _over_ eager _,_ Doctor,” she said with a light sigh in her breath. “You and I spending time alone together in a romantic setting … It. It’s dangerous.”

“Right,” he drawled out with obvious disappointment. “Got it. No more romantic dates.” He sighed and looked upward as he waited for Rose to finish up getting dressed. “I’ll make sure that Romana is advised of that for the next time she orders me to take you on a romantic trip.”

Rose adjusted the visor. There was humour in her voice, despite the somewhat serious nature of the discussion. “Despite romanticism not being a strong point within the Time Lord society, I think Romana’s suggestion of a romantic trip didn’t include us meeting up with your ex-girlfriend with whom you have some rather spectacular unfinished business with.” 

“It was hardly intentional,” he argued with a huff.

“Never is with you, yeah?” She shook her head. “Always _unintentionally_ getting into danger and mayhem. Really, Doctor, and you call _me_ jeopardy friendly.”

“I don’t want to fight,” he breathed out warningly. “Please.”

Rose’s brows lifted. “You don’t?” She flicked her eyes toward Phennea, who was in discussion with members of her team. “Seem to want to get into it with her well enough.”

“I mean with you,” he amended with a growl. He pressed the butt of his hand into the plastic shield that covered his face as though wanting to press it into his forehead. “Gods, Rose. Why can’t we have a conversation that doesn’t dissolve into all the things I’ve done wrong by you?”

She shrugged. There was no hostility at all in her voice. She spoke in a very gentle, yet very matter-of-fact manner. “Probably because there are so many things, Doctor.” She looked toward the crack and let out a breath so that her next words were practically whispered. “So many things.”

“Then why do you still love me?” he queried with a crease in his brow and obvious pain in his voice. “Why do you still want me around if I’m such a horrible person?”

She looked at him with a small smile and lifted her hand to touch at the side of his helmet. “You’re not a horrible person, Doctor,” she assured him. “Not at all. For each one the negatives, there’re about a hundred really _really_ good positives. My tiny little inferior human heart beats for you because …” She sighed and shook her head. “It just does. It always will.” She pressd her hand to her chest and looked away from him and toward the crack in the wall. “It’s just a little bruised right now. The dual-standard of Bad Wolf and her … Well … what she did…”

“It was unfair,” he offered her gently. “I know, Rose. And you have no idea at all how much that hurt me to find that out.”

She held her hand out to him and gave him a smile. “Water under the bridge, yeah?”

“Mudslide more like,” he said with a sigh. He took her hand and stroked his thumb along hers. “Full of tree stumps, rocks, cars from drivers who thought they could drive through the rapids and get out in one piece.”

“You mean me and you?” she asked with a laugh. “Yeah. Sounds about right. Rush on in blind and hope we get out without a rescue party.” Her head tipped toward the crack. “Come on, then. Let’s take a look at what lies in wait beyond the big ugly crack.”

“Yeah, okay,” he murmured as he allowed himself to be led by her toward it. There was no smile on his face toward her eagerness. He felt somewhat hurt by her flippant remark about the two of them rushing in where they shouldn’t and wondered which just part of them she was referring to.

He allowed her to step through ahead of him, despite wanting to ensure her safety by taking the lead. Something held him back, though. He justified it by thinking that if there was danger, he could better pull her from it than give her a hard shove backward. He did give a protective pull of her toward him when he heard her let out a whimper and a gasp at way lay behind the wall. Rose settled against his chest with a sigh as they both stood silently on the precipice between worlds.

“My God, Doctor,” she breathed out. “This is beautiful.”

“Be careful,” he murmured against the side of her helmet as they stepped from the laboratory into the world beyond. “We don’t know just what is in…” he gasped himself at the sight that lay beyond the wall. “By the robe of Rassilon.”

The scene that lay before them was one that was breathtaking to say the least. The cavern that lay beyond the wall was almost endless. The lavender grasses that were up above on the surface carpeted the expanse ahead of them. It was scattered with a tapestry of brilliant blue luminescent blooms that dotted the grasses and climbed high pillars of orange rock not unlike the coral of the TARDIS. They provided light enough for both the Doctor and Rose to look upon the blossoming life that surrounded them.

Not all of what they looked upon was breathtaking and brilliant. There were patches of oozing, acrid-smelling slime. Most of the ooze seemed to be on the walls and the tall, towering pillars within the cavern. It all seemed to move with slow popping bubbles that released green gasses.

“This,” Rose breathed out with awe. “This is something else, isn’t it?”

“The beginning of the creation of life,” the Doctor said against her helmet in a breathy tone. “When new species crawl out of the primordial ooze to spread life across a planet.”

“Till you said that, I was thinking this was beautiful,” she remarked with a smile ass he stepped forward and out of his hold to take a look around. “Leave out the ooze bit next time, yeah?”

“But that’s the best bit,” he half cheered as he stepped around himself. His head was high as he took in the thin branching lines from vines that stretched from pillar to pillar like a web. “That’s how life is, Rose. It’s the emergence of a tiny little single celled organism swimming in a smelly puddle of goo and ooze, an ancient embryonic sack of evolutionary enzymes if you will…”

“Lovely,” Rose said with a laugh.

“That was you with our two children,” he offered. “For fourty weeks they swimming around in similar conditions to these. Growing and evolving into two beautiful, _brilliant_ , Human/Gallifreyan children.”

She paused at the base of a tall orange column and looked up the length of it toward the top. Her look of ick shifted more toward an expression of wonder at the oozing popping bubbles above her. “I suppose, when you put it that way.”

He walked beside her and took her hand in his. “Granted, the waters our children grew from were…” He paused when she made a hush sound.

“Just. Just leave it,” she said with a smile. “You had me at awe and wonder at the initial comparison. Keep it going and you might shift me back to ew.” She didn’t lower the seat of her chin, but she did slightly angle her head downward to ward him. “I thought you said the work that the CIA were doing was wrong?”

“It is,” he answered. “So very wrong.”

“How?” she asked with her head still looking upward. She let out a gasp to see a small insect flutter up above. “You told me that this planet was uninhabited, that nothing survived a meteor strike.” She lifted her arm to point at the insect. “But now, look. With your friend’s work, life has returned.”

“Ahead of schedule, though,” he stated breathily, awed by the scene around them as she was.

“Is that really a bad thing, though, Doctor?” She lowered her head to look at him. “Isn’t it a good thing that new life is here, and that the planet is being reborn?”

His head lowered and he looked toward her. There was an apologetic, and almost sad look on his face. “It’s not,” he answered honestly. “It’s not right.” He looked up again. “Accelerated evolution like this…” he shook his head, his brows lifting and pulling together with sadness. “The species that emerge, they’re not strong and well adapted like they should be … as they would if their evolution had followed a slower and much more adaptive path.”

“Accelerated life spans, you mean?” she ventured. 

“From not being evolved properly adapted to their surroundings,” he agreed. “Which means premature death.” He exhaled. “What Phen’s doing here. Her research. It’s accelerating the evolutionary path of these beautiful creatures. They’re being born, being _created_ , evolving, too far ahead of schedule. The planet will die again.”

“That’s so sad,” she breathed out. “Dying before even having the change to live.” She lowered her head to the lavender grass at her feet. “So I guess you’re demanding that they shut down their operations here.”

“Yeah,” he drawled out.

“And I’m also guessin’ that they can’t stay here.”

“If they do,” he admitted. “Then they’ll continue their research, and this new life – Eotune’s second chance – will be over before it’s even begun.”

She nodded very slowly. “You can’t let that happen, and I don’t blame you for that,” she half whispered. “And that means I’m also assuming you can’t send them back to Gallifrey, because they’ll just send them back – or send in a new team to continue where this lot stopped.”

His hand tightened around hers. “Is it that you know me, or you know the Time Lords in general that well?”

“Thirteen years of my life,” she answered him. “Fifteen if I include the time I spent with you before I ended up on Gallifrey.” She inhaled. “Fifteen years of my life with Time Lords and the Gallifreyan people as the most influential and important people in my life.”

“For Twelve of those years, the most influential and important one being me,” he ventured softly. He turned toward her and brought his hand up to cup at the side of her visor as though trying to cup her cheek. “And by will of Omega, I will be again.”

“By the will of _you_ will work well enough,” she said with a small smile. “I don’t care what Omega, what Rassilon, and what the Other want – Just you, Doctor.” She inhaled hard. “It’s up to you, and you alone.”

“It’s most certainly _my_ will,” he vowed. “That’s a promise I make to you right here, and right now, Rose. I’ll do what I need to to be put back on that pedestal you once had me on.”

She snorted through her nose. “Which starts with you asking me to bring your ex-girlfriend home with us, doesn’t it?” Her eyes danced toward him. “Because that’s what you want to ask, isn’t it?” She watched, as well as heard, as he drew back a deep and painful looking swallow and refused to take her eyes from his. “Not hard to work out.”

He exhaled hard. “Okay. I’ll admit that looks a little on the inappropriate side of things.”

She looked away from him to glance back at the column. “In your favour, though, at least you asked me first.” She pursed her lips. “Although not in her favour is the fact that she seems to have a few regrets in her past about setting young Theta Sigma free and is looking to reconnect.”

“I don’t think I’m going to get used to hearing you call me that,” he admitted with a sigh. “The rest of them, yeah. Quite used to that.” He looked at her. “But you? You’ve always called me Doctor.” He shuddered with a flutter in his eyes when she provided another name she used inside their more intimate moments. “Yeah,” he dragged out inside a breath with a pinch in his brows as his mind supplied an image of such a moment. “Yeah. That one, too.”

“Can she possibly be a threat to us?” she asked after a moment.

His eyes flashed open and he looked to her with a quick snap of his head. “I’m sorry? What do you mean by a _threat_?”

She couldn’t look at him, instead she focused on the column ahead of her. She swallowed unsurely before answering. “To the two of us reclaiming who we once were. Is there a chance that your past, ehm, affections could…”

“Oh no,” he choked out. “No. No. No. No. No. No. No, Rose. Not. Not at all.” His eyes were wide with horror as he looked toward the column that seemed to have Rose’s full attention. “Even without a bond guard in place preventing it, I wouldn’t entertain the idea.” A look of distaste fell across his features. “No. Absolutely not. Phennea and I are ancient history. What we had – or truthfully didn’t have – is best left in the halls of the Academy, thank you.”

“What happened?” she asked plainly.

He shook his head and made a sound of protest. “Rose. I really don’t want to.”

She looked at him with a flat stare. “Then I don’t want her joining the Gallifreyan contingent at my house.”

“Rose, please.”

She shook her head. “No, Doctor. I’m not letting you invite a woman who knows you as intimately as I do, who broke your hearts and now looks to shack up with you again, into my home.” She looked ahead of herself again. “If you can’t tell me something – anything – about what happened, and be honest with me about it, then no. She can’t stay. Simple.”

“This is something I didn’t think you were capable of,” he breathed out. “Holding someone hostage like this.”

She snorted out. “My best friend. My closest ally. The man I’ve held company with every single night of the past three years is Irving Braxiatel.” She smiled. “Think I had a good teacher on being able to use uncomfortable means to get my way.” She pursed her lips. “And Romana, she’s not opposed to asserting her dominance either when she feels she has to.”

He seemed quite stunned by that revelation. “Hold on. Did you say Brax has been with you every single night since … since that day on Gallifrey?” He held up a hand ready to counter off her indignance at the implication. “And I’m not meaning that in the way you’re thinking I am. I mean to say: He really stepped up for you, didn’t he?”

She exhaled. “Yeah, he did.” She looked at him. “Which is why it hurts me that you and Romana are keeping things from me about him. About what he did that got you and her all upset and forced him to run away.” 

He exhaled hard. “I don’t want to talk about him right now, Rose.”

“No,” she breathed out. “You want to talk about your Ex.”

“Much rather you didn’t refer to her in that way,” he gruffed out. “A rather tasteless description, really.”

“But apt, I would hope,” Rose ventured. She turned to face him. There was a flatness in her eyes that he was not used to seeing from her. “Because if you’re thinkin’ otherwise. If you think there’s a chance at all that you can become ex- _ex_ -lovers, then I’m out.”

His return expression was just as devoid of emotion as hers was. It was quite clear, however, that the implication was one he found hugely offensive. “How could you even begin to think me capable of that?”

“Maybe because you’re skirting the issue as much as you are,” she challenged him. 

“Maybe because talking about it hurts,” he countered. “You don’t seem to consider that, do you, that talking in the way you want me to about everything you want me to talk about, it hurts.”

She pursed her lips and nodded her head slowly. “So as long as _you’re_ not the one hurtin’ then,” she said flatly. “Gotcha.” She huffed and took her hand from his with a firm tug to separate them. “You know what, Doctor. Take me home, yeah?” she walked toward the opening between worlds with her hands fisted at her sides. “Tell your girlfriend that she’s welcome to come back to the house and stay. Better yet, put her up in your TARDIS.”

He spun slowly no his heel to follow her walk with narrowed and furious eyes. “You’re being a bit unreasonable; don’t you think?”

“I think I’m being very reasonable,” she corrected him with a pause in her step and a light turn so that she talked along her shoulder at him. “All I’ve been for the past three years is _fucking_ reasonable, Doctor. I’ve been nothing less than completely reasonable and accommodating, thank you very much. To you, to your people, to an unforgiving and selfish fucking universe.” She stalked toward him. “And all I’m asking in return from you – from any of you – is for a little explanation.” She stood in front of him now, her eyes wet and as red as the apples of her cheeks. “But you can’t give me that, can you? Hurts too much, you say. Well how do you think it makes me feel when you don’t talk to me?”

He huffed out angrily but said nothing. He had a fair idea of what she was about to say, and Rassilon curse him, he couldn’t argue with it. 

“Let me give you a hint,” she continued with a sniff. “Starts with an H, ends with an S.” Her furious voice shifted toward defeat. “I don’t want to hurt anymore. I just can’t take it. I’m so tired of pretending that all is well and that I’m perfectly and happily alright in the universe. But, I am so tired of pretending, because you know what, Doctor? I’m not. I’m not okay.” She tried wiping her eyes, but only managed to wipe at her visor. “And the only one of you who could ever see that … the only one of the 200,000 people living at my house who could ever understand how much pain I am in, was Brax. Now he’s gone, and I have noone.”

His hearts shattered when she dropped her head and slouched her shoulders. Her hands lifted to cover her face – her visor – and she dissolved in front of him. He was frozen in place with no clue at all in what to say or even do right now.

Rose lifted her head after a moment, and although there was still a sob lodged in the back of her throat, she managed out a smile, plastered on as it was. “You know. Here I am standing on an alien planet, with new and incredible life being created all around me. I should be crying tears of awe and wonder.” She inhaled deeply and reschooled herself in a manner she’d perfected over the past three years. “I’m going to appreciate this a bit, for a bit.” 

“Rose,” he bleated out with a waver.

She gave him a wave. “Don’t worry about me, Doctor. I’m good, yeah.” She walked past him to wander back toward the column. “Just had a moment, that’s all.” She looked up. “So what can you tell me about this, anyway. I mean, was it part of the eco system before the meteor?” She looked back at him. “Or was it a complete Control+Alt+Delete thing, and everything coming now is completely brand new?”

All he could do was stare at her with eyes wide and somewhat horrified. He didn’t quite know which was worse: That she was in so much pain, or that she was suppressing it as deeply and forcefully as she was. Braxiatel had mentioned that night that she needed to break, to release, or it was going to destroy her. That he should have been glad that it was with him when the release finally happened, because only he could keep her safe when it happened. Even having medical on standby just in case…

…Of course, Braxiatel should never have weaponised it. 

But anyway now. Now he could see a glimmer of just what his brother meant by that. She was falling, and then inhaling it all inside with a hard gulp and a forced smile. Hell. She’d become him.

“I’m sorry,” he breathed out. “Rose. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not,” she said with a sigh as she lifted her head to look upward again. She knew what he was apologising for but didn’t have the energy to pretend that she didn’t. “I have no regrets of becoming your mate, and having those two beautiful kids of ours, Doctor. Don’t ever think I do. I love you with everything I have inside me, and I always will.”

“I’m just so flawed,” he admitted with a stroll up to her side. “So very flawed.”

“We all are to some degree,” she said with a sigh. “Some more than others, of course.” She drew in a deep breath. “I just wish you’d talk to me, that’s all. What I told her – Phennea – about you bein’ a closed book. You shouldn’t be. Not to me.”

“I know,” he admitted with a wince. He tried to put hands in pockets, but there weren’t any in his suit. He made do with folding his arms loosely across his chest. “Phen,” he began with a croak in his voice.

She felt his discomfort as much as she heard it. “Doctor. You know what. It’s okay, don’t bother.”

His hand dropped to clasp hers, and he did so tightly. “You’ve got a Time Lord ready to open up to you, Rose,” he warned her. “Best you take the opportunity while you can, because it might be a while before the opportunity comes around again.”

She turned toward him but held off on grabbing his other hand to pull him in to face her. She knew he’d need the freedom to turn away and try and escape the sympathy or pity he thought he’d see in her eyes. She didn’t say anything to spur him on anymore. She’d taken him this far, he needed to get himself across the finish line here.

“We met at the Academy when I was about a third of the way through my studies,” he began quietly. “She had been a classmate of Koschie’s, but never what you would call friends. It wasn’t until the two of them got paired on a lab assignment in Quantum Field Mathematics that they elevated from the level of classmates to friends.” He swallowed and drew in a breath. “By that stage, Brax was on the fast track to an exciting life within the Capitol. He’d drawn the eyes and the attention of council and was already racing across the universe in his capsule and becoming a legendary explorer like our father. He was legend in my eyes, and in those of my classmates.”

Rose smiled a little. “A legend in your eyes?”

“Oh,” he sang without looking at her. “Right up toward the final exams, Rose, I wanted to _be_ him. Had all of the respect in the universe for him.”

“What happened?”

He blew out a breath. “She did,” he admitted. “Phen and I, when we met, we came together pretty quickly. She was…” his brows lifted. “She was breathtaking to a clumsy, awkward adolescent that I was back then. She gave me the attention and affection that I was starved for. Made me feel like I was _something_ and that I could be someone brilliant.”

“She wasn’t wrong.”

A small smile graced one edge of his mouth. “Well. What I could have been, and what I became.” He exhaled a breath. “Rose, from the moment we met, Phennea put me on a path that would end up becoming my complete undoing. She pushed me away from my family, my brother, and my best friend. I ended up resenting each and every one of them.”

“How did she do that?”

His brows lifted and his eyes widened. “Oh, now that is a long story.” He turned his head to her. “And when I say long, it’s a story that spans sixty years.”

She gasped. “You and her were together for sixty years?”

“Yeah,” he drawled with a wrinkle in his nose. “But really, Rose. That’s a blink of an eye for Gallifreyans. Even quicker in the lifespan of a Time Lord.” He rubbed at the back of his head. “Linear to a human lifespan, probably only a few months, really. Enough to be well and truly in that infatuated, honeymoon stage of love. Spending more time under the sheets than not…”

“Moving on, yeah?” she said with clear discomfort. “I didn’t need that image.”

“I was also, as I said, an adolescent experiencing love and lust for the very first time. I fell. Hard. And despite the warnings from my brother, my father, old Quences, and even my professors, I let myself.” He pursed his lips and let out a soft laugh. “Bullheaded that I am, I told them all to go to hell. I fought against the words and wisdoms of all of them and let her drag me toward the very place I’d told that lot to head to.” His head shook. “I was so blindly infatuated that I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see the change in myself, the change in my friendships, and the change in everyone around me. Until it was too late, of course.”

He paused and Rose waited for him to continue. She was ready to press him on with a sound, or light squeeze of his hand, but she could see in the way he awkwardly slapped his tongue to the roof of his open mouth that he was simply struggling to figure out what to reveal next.

“We spoke of marriage when Graduation was on approach.” He cleared his throat and stared directly ahead of him. “I was on track for graduation with distinction. There was a big opportunity for a fast-tracked council position. Brax had already proved himself a solid benefit to the robe wearing stills at the Capitol. I was geared to finish with a higher rank than even him.” He grinned. “And I couldn’t wait for that, could I? One up on Brax – it’s my life ambition.”

“For you both,” Rose said with a laugh.

His smile fell. “Yeah, but with that came the betrothment offers from other houses. Braxiatel had escaped the responsibility of marrying well to best align and strengthen bonds between the chapterhouses. Thought I could do the same as well. Run off like him, save myself a life of misery with a wife that I didn’t chose.”

“I guess Phennea wasn’t one of the offers, then?”

He shook his head. “My family despised her. Like I said: Brax had warned me, so had the rest of the house, but I was taken, and I didn’t want to give her up.” He looked to her. “There was no chance of me following the same pathway as Brax. I couldn’t be him. There couldn’t be two of us. Our destinies had to follow very different paths.” He blew out a dark breath. “Gods, I resented him for that. I resented his freedom while realizing I was to be bound into a marriage and into a council position I didn’t want.”

“And I wasn’t going to do it,” he continued with a shrug. His mouth fell down into a deep frown while he spoke. “Phen came to me one night saying that she was facing the same future. That the both of us, we had to rebel against it. She promised me her hand, and her absolute devotion, but only if the two of us formed a pact to bomb ourselves out of contention completely.”

Rose’s mouth dropped open with shock. A breathy “oh no,” fell almost inaudibly through her lips.

“So I did,” the Doctor continued on, his hand tightening further around hers. “When exams came around, I failed. I failed again. I pushed it until I had my very last opportunity to write my exams, and I made sure that I passed by only a singe percent.” His eyes moved to hers. “Just enough to become a Time Lord, but not enough to qualify for any position above Archivist.”

“A what?”

His lifted his eyes and boldened his voice into an announcement. “A Scrutationary Archivist for the Bureau of Possible Events,” he leaned forward with a laugh. “The single most dull and boring position on the entire planet. By the Gods, if you ever have to listen to one of them actually speak… dull and boring on a level that insults the words dull and boring.” He shrugged. “And, well. Who wants to be the bride of a dull Archivist, then?”

“Not Phennea, I imagine.”

This is where it seemed to get hard for him. The Doctor’s eyes closed tight and he shifted his head on his neck as though trying to crack it. He closed his eyes as he spoke. “She didn’t want to be my bride even if I did make it to council.” His eyes slowly opened. “When we got our exam marks, and the finality of our studies and out future paths was upon us.” He gulped. “That’s when I found out the truth of her.”

“You mentioned Koschei,” Rose said softly. “Did she?”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “Yeah. They’d been together on and off for fifty years.”

Rose looked pained by that. “And he knew? I mean about you and her?”

“Yeah,” he drawled out softly. “Yeah, he did. Course he did. It’s not like I kept it a secret from him – he was my best friend. Well,” he sang out. “ _Was_ my best friend.” He smirked. “Only thing that I could draw from that to take any solace is that she did the same thing to him that she did to me. Koschei barely passed the Academy himself.” 

“Oh, Doctor,” she panted out. “I’m so sorry.”

“He wasn’t the only one, of course. There were others.” He blew out a breath. “Even Brax.”

Rose gagged out with horror. “I’m sorry, what? She slept with Brax?”

He looked at her a moment, holding that question in the air until he finally gave his head the lightest of shakes. “No. She tried, but he wasn’t interested.”

“Abhorrent behaviour,” she murmured with a perfectly disgusted impersonation of her brother in law. “Yeah, I can almost imagine just how hard he rejected her.”

“Quite publicly, actually,” he admitted. “Brax doesn’t do things by half, as you well know, and once he knew she was had interest in him of that nature. Well.”

“I really want to cheer him on right now,” she said with a deep sigh. 

“Yeah, and part of me did the same,” he admitted. “But the rest of me. I was just defeated. I couldn’t retake any of my exams. At that point, I’d exhausted all of my chances. I was set on a path that… well.”

“Toward great things,” she offered as supportively as she could in the moment. “Toward being Time’s champion, the protector or Earth and the universe, and the saviour of Gallifrey.” She rubbed at his arm. “Toward me?”

He looked at her with a smile of adoration. “The very best pathway of all,” he murmured affectionately with a drawing of his hand down the clear visor of her hood. “The one that leads to you.”

She bumped him with her hip and gave him a smile. “Corny, Doctor. Very corny.”

“It made you smile,” he said with a weak smile of his own. The smile fell and he drew in a deep breath. “So that’s the story of Phen and me, Rose. One worthy of one of the trashy romance novels we took from your bookcase back at the house and ceremoniously burned in the fireplace when you weren’t looking.”

She looked aghast at that. “You didn’t?”

He nodded, a pinch in his brows in no way apologetic. “We did. Had one of the Outerworlder elders speak a cleansing chant while we did it, too…”

“Liar,” she said with a laugh as she rolled up onto her toes to pull him into a hug. She curled her arms around his neck and walked forward on her toes to press herself up against his chest. She wasn’t surprised, and certainly wasn’t protesting, when his arms snapped tightly around her waist to draw her yet closer. “Thank you,” she said against his hood. 

“No,” he breathed out against her hood. “Thank you, Rose.” He drew in a breath. “It’s actually quite liberating to talk about it,” he admitted. 

She hummed happily. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m going to get anything else out of you as easily, does it?”

“Absolutely not,” he agreed as he released her from his embrace and ran his arm along her shoulder. He walked the two of them toward the door. His lip curled up a little. “Talking about things. I’m still not wholly on board with it.”

“No,” she breathed out. “I didn’t think so.”

“So?” he asked after a second. “Are we good? You and me?”

“We will be,” she assured him, her head on his shoulder as they walked.

“And Phen?” he broached carefully. “She and her team. Can they?”

Rose nodded. “I was never going to say no,” she admitted. “You _know_ that. I’m not heartless, nor am I that petty. I won’t send anyone away if they need your help.” She swallowed. “Even your ex girlfriend.”

“But it would cause strain.”

“It would have,” she admitted. “And I would have probably acted a little unreasonable toward her and very territorial toward you.”

His brows lifted. “Which might not have been a bad thing, come to think of it. I wouldn’t mind a bit of overt territorialism from you.” He smiled. “That would involve heavy petting and kissing, and probably some rather loud kinds of…” he oofed when she slapped the back of her hand on his chest. “Right. Not so much of that, then.” He pursed his lips. “You sure you’re okay with it, though?”

“Only if I get to tell Romana,” she said with a smile. “You know, about the Brax thing. I think seeing Romana with a bit of rising territorialism might be fun.”

His smile fell flat. “Oh. That might not be good, Rose. Really probably best you don’t.”

She looked up at him with her widest and most pleading expression. Her lips pursed and puckered and she swayed in a manner that was pleading.

He fought the pleading, he really really did. But he was hopeless against her when she was like this. No matter the body he was in, when Rose wanted something enough that she’d pull out these kinds of stops, he was too weak to fight it.

“Oh okay,” he huffed out. “Fine.” His head shook at her immediate grin and the happy sound that squeaked inside her throat. “Right. We’ve been here long enough now, I think. We should get back to the house. Time for the school run, yeah?”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	9. Nature Channel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Rose arrive to Romana waiting at the TARDIS doors - and some bored Gallifreyans manage to get into some mischief.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The tail-end of this chapter was written for The_Plot_Thinnens -- who gave me a random idea in the comments section that had me peeing myself laughing.
> 
> Don't know that I was able to be in anyway amusing (in case you can't tell, comedy is not really my thing at all), but I did try. I couldn't run with a Gallifreyan Steve Irwin, though, and opted for a likeness of Sir David Attenborough instead .. it fit a little better.
> 
> Hope it doesn't disappoint, dear.
> 
> So... starts off all frustrated Romana, ends with something a little crack-like. I sinceriously hope that you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

The sound of an impending TARDIS materialisation called out a shrill cry across the now cosy living room of Rose’s home. Romana looked up from the giggling face of the baby gurgling in her lap toward the vacant place where the Doctor usually parked his ship.

“Right on time,” she said with a smile as steam filled the empty space, and the blue time ship slowly flickered into existence. She gave the child a tickle and a coo, then picked her up and placed her into a bassinette beside the couch. She still wore her smile as she rose to a stand and wiped her palms on her skirt. “Here’s hoping that daft fool was able to properly romance his mate.” She looked down to the gurgling child. “Maybe they’ve come back with one of you in her womb. What do you think? Wouldn’t that be lovely for them?”

She looked back to the TARDIS as it completed its materialisation. “Although, it might be a little premature of them to add to their brood right now.” She folded her arms across her chest and waited for the final steam of materialisation to dissipate. She held onto her smile as the door opened, a smile that fell into a wide-eyed expression of curiosity and shock when she saw Rose exit the TARDIS ahead of the Doctor.

Her beautiful cream dress was covered with lavender grass stains, orange mud, and was ripped at the shoulder. Her makeup was smudged and blotchy, and her hair was a frightful mess.

“By Omega, what happened to you?” she gasped out when Rose walked out of the TARDIS and stepped up toward her.

Rose did seem slightly amused, but at the same time seemed slightly out of sorts. “Next time you order the Doctor to take me on a romantic trip – please remember that it’s _the Doctor_ you’re speaking to.”

Romana lifted one arm from the fold across her chest to drop her forehead into her hand. She let out a sigh as she dragged it down the length of her face and looked to the doorway of the TARDIS, of which the Doctor had yet to alight. “I should have known,” she breathed out. “He landed you in a spot of trouble, then?”

“Well the landing spot wasn’t all that dangerous,” Rose defended with a smile. “In fact, it was very lovely and romantic…”

“But?”

“But about ten metres from the TARDIS, there was a gigantic pit of death that I managed to fall into, that led toward a subterranean base filled with…”

“Don’t tell me there were evil entities,” Romana interrupted with a slight whimper of defeat.

“Depends,” Rose said with a shrug. “What are your thoughts on the CIA?” She looked back at the open TARDIS door. “What’s that stand for again, Doctor?”

A single word of question filtered through the doorway in the Doctor’s curious voice, which prompted Romana to answer instead. “Celestial Intervention Agency?”

“That’s the one,” Rose said with a wide smile. “Not quite the Doctor’s favourite mob, it seems.”

“Nor mine,” Romana admitted with a sigh. Her eyes lifted high to the ceiling and she shook her head. “Just what were the CIA doing this time?”

“I’ll let him explain it to you,” she answered with a shrug. “And let you know the identities of the new New-Lungbarrow residents while he’s at it.”

“I’m sorry?” Romana breathed out with a low tilt of her head. “Did you say you brought along more of the Gallifreyan people – specifically members of the CIA?”

“As if you think it couldn’t get any better than that,” Rose added. “Wait till you find out who one of those CIA agents are.” She lifted her eyes upward and let out a sigh. “Again, I’ll ask: Remember just who it is that you’re talking to when you think a date-night is on the cards. As far as complete disasters go, this was definitely one of the more remarkable ones.”

“Who did he bring back?” Romana asked worriedly. “Oh, please don’t tell me it’s Narvin. The absolute last person I want to see right now is Narvin.”

Rose’s brows lifted. “Oh?” Romana’s obvious disdain for this individual was very interesting, and she was hoping for a good tale of deceit and betrayal. “Now you have me curious. Who’s Narvin?”

“It’s really best you don’t know,” she answered breathily. She then looked to the doorway of the TARDIS, curious as to why the Doctor hadn’t yet appeared. “Who was it he brought back, then?”

“His ex-girlfriend, actually,” Rose breathed out with a tired lift of her eyes. “His very first love, and the one who broke his hearts.” She exhaled. “And one who looks to want to get a leg up and over him.”

Both of Romana’s hands dropped and she slouched with a lift of her chin to the ceiling. “Oh, for the love of all in this universe that is holy.” She glared toward the TARDIS doors. “Doctor! Get out here, right now. I want to talk to you.”

“The exact opposite of what you should do if you want him to come out any time this century,” Rose said with a laugh. “He’ll scarper deeper into the TARDIS to avoid it.”

“He’ll have to come out some time,” she growled. “I’ve got enough regenerations left in me to wait him out.”

“It’s okay,” Rose said with a weak smile. “He and I. We’ve talked about it. We’re on … even ground right now about it.”

“I know you better than that,” Romana corrected. “This doesn’t sit comfortably with you at all.”

“No, not really. And I imagine it won’t sit comfortably with you, either,” Rose said with a smirk. “When I tell you that back at the academy she made a move on Brax – while she was shaggin’ the Doctor.” She looked to the door. “And if she’s thinkin’ that the Doctor’s still a beautiful man worth a flirt and a snog, wait till she gets a load of Brax.”

“He is quite easy on the eyes this time around, I must admit.”

“Drop dead gorgeous,” Rose corrected with a laugh. She turned to face Romana with a somewhat conspiratorial expression in her eyes. “So can I count on you for some good old fashioned tag-team cattiness?” She flicked her eyes to the Time Lady’s lips, that were shifting into a smile. “You know. For stress release?”

“You mean after I’ve glared and admonished your husband into a new incarnation?” She nodded. “Yes, of course. Happy to assist.” She made a sound in the back of her throat to clear it. “Doctor, when you’re ready. Please do come out of the TARDIS so we may discuss a thing or two.”

“Oh what is it, now?” he growled with frustration faked to hide his true apprehension as he stepped out of the TARDIS. 

Several individuals followed out behind him, including a lone female that Romana assumed to be the Ex that Rose had described. She looked toward the group and straightened her back to set her posture high. “My fellow Gallifreyans. Welcome to Earth. For those of you who don’t know me – and I would be quite surprised if any of you _don’t_ – I am Romanadvoratrelundar, former President of Gallifrey, and one of the three hosts that welcome you here.” She gestured toward Rose. “This is Lady Rose of the Lungbarrow estate. His Lord Cardinal is unfortunately unavailable to make greeting alongside us, but I can assure you of his welcome.”

There were murmurs from the new group, and Romana paused with her brows high and her expression somewhat irritated. Once silence was achieved, she gestured toward the kitchen door. “Please make your way through that doorway. Lady Cerein will enter you into our system, assign you temporary living quarters, and walk you through the rules and expectations for your stay here.”

She looked toward the Doctor, and to the breathlessly beautiful woman that stood off to his side. “I expect you’re the one that Rose told me about?”

Phennea stepped forward with a hand held in greeting. “I am Phenneatryithdelphirassilonmas of the Great House of Rassilon. Lead scientific advisor for operations at Eotune…”

“Eotune?” Romana interrupted with query. “I wasn’t aware there were any operations based on Eotune.” Her eyes flicked to the Doctor. “It was my understanding that it was an uninhabited planet considered unsafe for visitation.”

“Safe enough,” he said with a shrug. “At least I thought so at any rate.”

Phennea withdrew the hand that Romana had refused to take. “Covert and incorrect classification by the CIA,” she advised. “Arranged by Coordinator Narvin at the order of His Lord President Rassilon shortly after he took office, so that we could research and experiment on accelerated rehabilitation of Gallifrey’s ecosystems once the war efforts were complete.”

“I see,” Romana answered with apparent disinterest. “Then it might please you to know that we have some of Gallifrey’s most intelligent scientific minds working on those same plans right now. I encourage you to meet with them to discuss and collaborate.” She gestured to the kitchen. “So if you wouldn’t mind, lady… I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

“Phenneatryithdelphirassilonmas,” she repeated blandly. “Or Phennea if you prefer.”

“Phennea,” Romana echoed. “If you wouldn’t mind. As this serves as the living quarters for Lady Rose, His Lord Doctor, Lord Cardinal, and myself, this section of the facility is off-limits to non-approved personnel. I request that you follow the rest of your team to register for your place here at New Lungbarrow.”

Rose could detect the slight smile in Romana’s voice, but opted to remain silent about it. The Doctor, however, narrowed his eyes and looked first to Romana and then toward Rose. He waited until Phennea had walked through the doorway to say anything, and when he did it was with a measure of annoyance. “It didn’t take you long to fill her in, did it?”

“What can I say: I’m an open book with her.”

“Mostly,” Romana said affectionately. She then looked toward the Doctor with an expression of incredulous disbelief. “Doctor. I gave you a single demand. A relatively simple assignment that you find a peaceful and romantic location where you and your mate might find an opportunity to reconnect and speak openly without the distractions a full home provides.”

He lifted his eyes, rolled them off to one side, and rounded his mouth around a single: “Well.”

“It is my understanding that you and I do speak the same language,” she continued with a slow fold of her arms across her chest. “And yet, I am struggling to understand just what part of _peaceful and romantic location where you and your mate might find opportunity to reconnect_ includes finding danger and bringing home an ex-girlfriend to live with you.”

“The facetious condescension really is unnecessary, thank you,” he gruffed out indignantly.

“No,” she insisted with a shake of her head. I disagree. I think its absolutely necessary.” She gestured toward Rose. “Look at her, Doctor. She’s an absolute mess. Filthy and dishevelled. Her clothing torn and covered in some rather disgusting looking substance. This is not how one ends up after a romantic date.”

Rose bit back a laugh, and certainly bit back a comment that may have had any one of her human friends nodding in agreement and joining her in a laugh. She instead thumbed behind her. “Yeah. And speaking of. I’m going to jump in the shower and get changed before I go grab the kids. Still need me hanging around?”

The Doctor and Romana answered her question with exact opposite answers at precisely the same time. The Doctor wanting her to stay, Romana willing to give permission for her to leave.

“I’ll leave you two to talk then,” Rose said with a smile. She looked to the Doctor. “I’ll be leaving to pick up the kids in about an hour if you’d like to join me.”

“I’d like that,” he answered with a smile. He looked down at his own slightly soiled suit. “Gives me time to clean up as well.”

“Not before you and I have finished our discussion,” Romana warned him. She gave Rose a light wave as she walked toward the stairs. She could hear the Doctor’s grunt of annoyance but ignored it to give him a weary look. She wiped at her eyes with her thumb and index finger and let out a small breath. “Sometimes, Doctor, I have to wonder just how you and your brother were able to mate yourselves with two women of the high calibre of Rose and myself. I really do.”

“Don’t think the two of us aren’t asking ourselves the same question on an hourly basis,” he managed out. He held up his hands to her. “Look. Yes. I know. I was supposed to take Rose somewhere special, and to be perfectly frank with you, Eotune did seem to be a very appropriate location to do that in.” He blew out a breath. “Uninhabited, quiet, absolutely remarkable in its beauty.”

“I really can’t argue that,” she admitted. “Brax and I spent time there ourselves when we needed to escape the war and have some quiet time, just the two of us.”

“Well,” he drawled out. “Had it not been for Rose’s rather magnificent ability to get into some form of trouble, it may well have continued to be the romantic and sensual location I had hoped it would be.” He sighed hard. “If she hadn’t fallen, then she wouldn’t have seen the signs of off-world intervention, I wouldn’t have gotten curious, and we’d never have stumbled onto a CIA operation that was …” he looked at her, business crossing his features. “That was damaging to the recovery and survival of what was left on Eotune.”

“Phennea mentioned scientific research on ecosystem rehabilitation,” she remarked gently. There was a pinch of curiosity in her eye. “But I expect you suspect something more to it than that for you to have shut them down and risked your marriage to bring home an ex-girlfriend and her party.”

“My marriage is at no greater risk now than it was before we left for Eotune,” he muttered under his breath. “Rassilon, Romana. I don’t know what I’m expected to do from here, I really don’t.”

“I’d like to say: _just be you, Doctor_ ,” she answered with a sigh. “But you’ve just spectacularly proven that just being _you_ isn’t really the best course of action – for anything, really.” She bit her lip and gave it a thought. “Her heart beats for you. Believe that. Believe that your hearts beat as much for her as hers does for you, and make sure she knows it. That’s all you can do.”

“It’s not enough,” he argued.

“Actually, it is,” she corrected him. 

“Excuse me, Lady President,” a young male Time Lord said with apology as he and two other men winded their way past. 

The Doctor looked on with his brows seated high at the sight of one man walking backward with a small and very ancient looking camcorder device filming another who was talking in rapid Gallifreyan about Earth, and the third who awkwardly held a cobbled together boom mic which consisted of a hand held microphone duct taped to a broom stick. “Excuse me,” he called out sharply. “What do you think you’re doing?” he pointed to the kitchen. “You lot are supposed to stay back there.”

“Oh, leave them,” Romana said with a sigh. She waved her hand at the trio to tell them to carry on. “They’re just a small group of very bored young reporters looking for something harmless to do. I gave them permission to film a documentary about this outpost if only to stop their incessant whining.” She looked back to him. “They’re quite harmless, Doctor. I wouldn’t be too concerned about them.”

“I suppose not,” he said with a sigh. He slid his hands into his pockets. “Does Rose know about it?”

“I haven’t had a chance to speak to her,” she admitted with a light lift of a wince in one cheek. “It probably would be a good idea for me to let her know. It’ll give her a chance to take a little more care when walking around upstairs.” She sighed. “Rose really does wear quite little when she thinks she’s out of sight.”

The Doctor’s eyes shifted to the stairwell and the thought of his wife parading around in next to nothing during the night-time hours. He found his mind travelling back to their home on Gallifrey, and the scantily dressed moments of the both of them when alone. He could almost hear the squeal of her when he set her in his sights and went in for the chase…

…Good times. Very good times. 

He shook the image from his mind with a shake of his body and a grunt and looked back toward Romana, who wore a smile of understanding.

“You’ll be back there soon enough,” she assured him.

“Gods,” he breathed. “I hope so.” He shook himself again. “Right. So. Anything interesting of note that was discussed in my absence?”

“To call it a discussion is stretching it somewhat,” she said with a sigh. “There was a rather brilliant argument that ensured between Elrald and Phiroi about whether or not to seek out members of the CIA to get a feel for the potential of an alliance.”

“Who won that one?”

“I did,” she answered flatly. “While we did have a firm ally in Coordinator Narvin before I was ousted from power, I don’t believe he’s one we can rely on this time around.”

“Why not?”

She let out a long breath. “His allegiance is toward title rather than person,” she sighed. “He was loyal to me when I was President, because I was President.”

“And so now he’ll ally himself with Rassilon…”

“Because _he’s_ President,” Romana answered with a nod of her head. She looked off to one side. “This would be easier if we had Brax here for the discussions. The configuration of his moral compass gives him a far better insight into the those with a morality as low as Rassilon’s.” She swallowed and rolled her head on her neck. “It also gives him wariness and caution that Elrald and Phiroi don’t have. Both of them, so quick to want to run in and get the lot of us destroyed in the process.”

“You miss him, don’t you?” the Doctor asked gently.

“More than I want to admit I do,” she said with a small smile. “For more reasons than is appropriate to admit to as well.”

“But,” he half choked, discomforted by the topic. “To have him here to plot and plan would definitely come in handy.” He blew out a breath. “Shame none of us know what he’s up to right now.”

“Which is a lie,” she accused flatly. “As I am quite sure you’ve been updated on his movements.”

His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How do you mean?”

“The code that you used in the capsules was different to the one you used in his,” she stated. “And it wasn’t a simple matter of you making adjustments to the strings. There was quite a lot of it missing.” She gave him a firm look of warning. “Braxiatel is not an idiot. He will do the least amount possible to get maximum results – and that includes how he writes his coding. He sent you a coded message, didn’t he?”

The Doctor huffed out a long and hard exhale. “Yes, Romana. He did. But I’m not going to tell you – or anyone – what he wanted me to know.”

“I’m not asking you to,” she said after a moment. “But I do want you to tell me: Is he safe?”

The Doctor shook his head. “That’s not even a question you need to ask, Romana. You already know the answer. We both do.” He drew in a breath and swallowed it. “Right now he’s the furthest thing from safe – and is only pushing himself inside deeper and more dangerous territory.”

“I want you to find him,” she whispered. “He can’t regenerate. He needs to be protected.”

“He’ll be fine,” he assured her. “Brax has gotten himself out of far worse than this with his face intact. As long as whomever he’s up against still believes he’s a Time Lord with regenerative and council power, no one will go near him.”

“You had better hope so,” she warned him. “Because your brother’s safety is now on you. For once, he’s become your responsibility rather than you being his.”

“Well, that’s not fair,” he gruffed out with a distasteful expression. “It’s not like I ever asked for him to look out for me.”

“You’re his little brother,” she said with a lift in her brow. “Of course he’s going to.”

He shuddered. “Don’t ever call me that again. Never again. Don’t ever say I’m his little anything.” He gave her an offended look. “I’m six hundred years older than you are,” he reminded her with a point of his finger into her chest. “Remember that when you want to act the adult and accuse me of being a little anything.”

She leaned forward and whispered against his ear. “Then act like it.”

A screech of his name from upstairs separated them immediately. The Doctor didn’t bother to look upstairs in question before he took off like a shot and leapt over the stair railing to take flight upstairs. 

“Rose!” he yelled out, barely aware of Romana taking the stairs behind him. “I’m coming!”

~~oooOOOOooo~~

“Get the camera ready, Saron” Lord Ferrim ordered with a hard whisper to his camera-lord, who was tampering with the settings. “I’m not really all that comfortable up here, so the quicker we can get done the better.”

Saron looked up from what he was doing with a lift in his brow. His voice was quiet and calm, deep for a man who looked as androgynous as he did. “Then just why’re we up here, then? You don’t look good on screen when you’re uncomfortable and out of sorts.”

“Oh, we’ll edit it,” he said with a huff. “Like we usually do. Filter it if you have to … isn’t that what I have you guys for: To make me look good?”

There was a snicker at his rear. “A task easier said than done, Ferrim.”

Ferrim didn’t look over his shoulder. “Just because you’re the sound guy, Autern, doesn’t mean you have to make any.”

“Yeah, right.”

Saron held the camera up in front of him, and toggled a couple of filter settings. “Just why’re we up here, anyway? You’ve got a pair of Dahrama’s downstairs you can profile. What’s up here?”

Ferrim looked toward the stairs and shook his head. “Those damn things terrify me. Looked at the male the other day and he snapped at me so hard from across the room, I thought he’d bitten my eyeballs out.” He thumbed at his nose. “Therefore, no profile of a Dahrama, thanks. I like this face and body I’ve got this time around, and would prefer to retain all of my limbs before my next regeneration.”

“Coward,” Autern muttered with a laugh.

Ferrim uttered a prime Gallifreyan insult that had both men laughing, then shook his head. “I did a stalk up here about twenty microspans ago. Saw a small multi-legged creature in the shower that I was going to talk about. Quick ask around, and found out they call it a spider or something.”

“In other words,” Saron queried. “You are going to profile something you know absolutely nothing about. And it doesn’t concern you that you’ll get caught lying?”

“Oh, who’s going to know?” he answered with a huff as he smoothed out his hair and used his spit on his thumb to smooth out his eyebrows. “This’ll be aired on Gallifrey, not Earth. I can call it what I want to call it and no one will be wiser for it.”

“No, but they might be dumber for it,” Autern said with a shrug.

“Thought you and I already were from having to work with this fool,” Saron said with a chuckle.

“When the two of you are ready!” Ferrim barked out with frustration. “Really. When we get back to Gallifrey, I’m firing the both of you.”

“You’d have to be paying us first if you intend on firing us,” Autern said with a shrug as he held up his broomstick and mic.

“We ready?” Ferrim asked. With the affirmatives from both men he gave himself a shake, made a series of sounds to stretch out his mouth, and then drew in a deep breath. When he began talking, it was in gentle, breathy tones not unlike the animal commentators from British nature shows he’d watched in his capsule.

“Animal life on Earth is as diverse as it is on Gallifrey. _Insect_ life on Earth, much like it is on Gallifrey, can be found in the most unusual of places within the home.” He smiled and walked toward the bathroom door. “One such insect is a species from the order known as Spider. They are a rather insignificant and small creature, but are considered fearsome beasts by the people of this planet – who have been known to run in terror from them.”

“Really?” Autern asked with his brows high. “But they’re so tiny. One step on it, and splat. Problem solved.”

“Autern,” Ferrim asked with frustration. “Quiet, please.” He looked to Saron. “Edit that out in production, okay? We’ll carry on.”

“Yeah,” Saron said with a shrug. “Blooper reel might be more interesting than the show, I’m thinking.”

“Get on with it,” Ferrim huffed. He looked back to the camera and pressed his hand on the door. “The spider, small and nimble that it is, likes dark and moist places to build it’s nest.”

“Nest?” Saron asked. “Thought they were web-builders?”

“My show, alright?” He huffed in reply. “Anyway. So the spider likes to build its nest in the rooms that Humans like to bathe and perform their digestive purgings. Beyond this door, in the corner of what humans refer to as a shower, is a specimen of spider that has me very excited to talk about.”

He looked to Saron. “I want a focused zoom of the lens toward the corner of the shower-stall.”

“Got it,” he answered with a shrug.

Ferrim looked back at the camera with a smile. He pressed his finger to his lip and quietened his voice. “Follow me. Best to remain quiet as to not startle the tiny creature.” 

He turned and pressed one hand to the door, using the other to drop the handle to release the latch. Very quickly he pushed open the door and let himself and his film crew in behind him. It was approximately four feet into the small room when the three of them froze in horror. Each of them with wide eyes of absolute and utter horror to see the shower stall occupied and the perfect silhouette of a naked woman washing with a loofah through the shower curtain.

It was crystal clear to them just who was on the other side of the curtain.

“Oh please tell me the Cardinal isn’t anywhere close,” Autern breathed out as he stepped backward. “Because dead. That’s what. Dead. All of us…” He stumbled with a trip over Rose’s discarded dress to fall back on the towel rack, which pulled from the wall and clattered noisily to the tiled floor.

“Romana?” Rose called out through the white, but almost sheer shower curtain. “Is that you?” She curled the curtain around her face and peered out into the bathroom.

Her eyes widened at the sight of three strange men milling in the doorway, one of them with a camera in his hand. She immediately let out a scream and pulled the almost completely transparent curtain around her naked body in an attempt to hide herself.

“Doctor!” She screamed out sharply, knowing that of anyone, he would move the fastest.

All three of them held up their hands in surrender. It was Ferrim who stammered his way through an apology. “Sorry, Lady Rose. We didn’t… I mean we were just… ehm…you weren’t supposed to be in here.” He panted. “Please, for the love of our lives, don’t tell the Cardinal. Please!”

The Doctor burst into the room, his eyes wild with panic. He looked at the three men in the room with his brows tight with confusion. “Rose, what’s happening?” He then looked toward the shower, and the shower curtain cocoon around Rose that left absolutely zero to the imagination, and froze in place himself…

…Oh, Sweet TARDIS of Gallifrey, she was magnificent. Oh, he wanted to fall onto his knees and beg mercy of her. He was _not_ worthy.

Romana stormed the room a mere two seconds after the Doctor had arrived. She took one look at Rose’s predicament, and of the four men frozen in place at the sight of her. She didn’t allow herself a single moment to feel in anyway embarrassed on Rose’s part, instead she boomed out a sound of utter fury.

“What in the name of our founders is going on in here?”

“Get them out!” Rose yelped, pulling the curtain tighter around herself. “For God’s sake, get them out of here! I’m naked in here!” She managed to peel an arm out from the thin plastic curtain. “And they’re filming!”

The Doctor immediately snapped from his reverie. He spun angrily, his expression dark and furious. “If you think the wrath of the Cardinal is one to be feared, then wait till you’ve dealt with his brother.”

“Don’t’ waste time talking about it, Doctor,” Rose whimpered. “Just. Get. Out!”

The Doctor held out his arms either side of him and stalked out of the bathroom, herding the three men with him. At their rear, Romana held two of them by the scruffs of their necks to pull them free.

“Doctor!” Rose called out. “The camera! Don’t let them…” She yelped with shock as the camera was thrown into the room with an inhumanly hard backhand from the Doctor, who didn’t even look back to see where it went. It collided hard with the wall and shattered noisily to the ground. She looked up and saw the side profile of her incensed Time Lord glaring at the men before the door was slammed closed.

She could hear raised voices of the five Time Lords and Lady beyond the doorway, and knew the trio were being very firmly reprimanded by Romana and the Doctor. With a sigh of complete and total embarrassment, she released the tight wrap of the shower curtain and turned toward the back wall of the shower stall. She gulped back a sound of frustration and leaned her forearms on the warm tile, laying her head on her arms to settle her face in the circle of her arms.

She wanted to cry with her frustration but found herself unable to. She wanted to scream out and stamp her feet, but wasn’t able to do that, either. She made do with heavy pants of upset and frustration against the tiled wall.

It wasn’t long before she heard the rustle of the curtain, and the shrill zinging sound of the curtain shifting across the rod. Even though the shower was still running, a pair of pinstriped arms moved in either side of her, and the Doctor pressed himself up against her back.

“Come here,” he whispered against her ear as he urged her to turn around to face him.

Despite her own inner protests that this could be a dangerous encounter between them - all he had to do was propose it, and she’d give in to him almost immediately – Rose turned inside his arms and walked into his chest. 

“God,” she breathed out pitifully when she felt his arms move around her back and hold her tightly. “That was mortifying.”

“It won’t happen again,” he vowed over the top of her head. “I’m so sorry it happened _this_ time.”

Rose let out an exhale and dropped her forehead onto his chest. “I wish I could say that was the first time one of your kind did something that proved to be completely horrifying, but it isn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Are they still alive?”

He chuckled at that question. “I left a few pieces for you to deal with when you’re dressed for it.” He looked over his shoulder toward the locked bathroom door. “Not sure if Romana will be as kind to them. Wow, does she have a temper.”

“That she does,” Rose agreed with a laugh. “And yet they’re all scared of Brax.”

He chuckled lightly and rubbed his hands on her arms. “Give me a sec,” he said with a whisper as he pulled back and grit his teeth to pull off his soaking blazer.

Rose gulped hard. “Doctor, I don’t think…”

“No,” he assured her. “I know. I’m here to comfort you, not proposition you, Rose. Don’t misread me.” He gulped with reverent remembrance. “Although, your naked form is much more magnificent than my mind remembered it was. So beautiful.”

He let his blazer slop heavily on the floor and looked at it with a brow lifted. “Damn thing’s heavy when it gets wet.” He shrugged and moved back to her. With his arms and chest now covered only in a thin Oxford, he pulled her into his arms again. “I’m going to see if we can find another outpost for all of them, Rose. You can’t continue like this.” He exhaled a long breath. “ _We_ can’t continue like this.”

She looked up at him, settling her chin into the small valley in between his hearts. Her eyes were wide on him, her lips full and set in a small smile. “It’s my new normal, Doctor,” she assured him. “They need me, and this really is the safest place for them right now.”

He dipped his chin and kissed her forehead. His lips then grazed down along the tip of her nose. “I need you, too,” he said with husk in his tone, but without the lust that would typically accompany it. “I need _us_. So much. We can’t do that while you have a household filled with bored Gallifreyans creating mischief and mayhem.”

“We’ll be okay, Doctor,” she assured him as she lifted onto her toes to put her mouth less than a half inch from his. “We’ll make time, yeah? Just you and me after the kids have gone down. Snuggle on the couch and remember how to be us again.”

“I’d like that,” he whispered against her lips. “But for now…” he closed the distance between them and drew her into a deep and emotional kiss. He pulled back just slightly after a short moment. “That okay?” he asked against her mouth.

“More than,” she answered as she closed the distance this time and pulled him into another, more insistent passionate, embrace.

A light knock on the door interrupted their quiet moment. “Rose?”

She snapped her mouth from his with a gasp looked around the Doctor’s shoulder toward the door. “Yes, Romana?”

“Will you and the Doctor be able to collect the children, or did you want me to pick them up?”

“It’s okay, I’ll be right out.” Rose looked to the Doctor with apology in her eyes. “I should, you know, go.”

“I know,” he said with a nod. “I might have to pass, though,” he said with a lift in his shoulders and a look down at his soaking pinstriped suit pants, Oxford, and tie that would take great effort to peel off his frame.

She thumbed to the door and stepped out of the shower, dripping on the floor as she fumbled to find a towel. “I should really go.”

He watched her nakedness as she battled to find something to cover up with affection and reverence rather than pure lust right now. One thing this woman was, was adorable when she pinkened up with embarrassment. “I’ll see you when you get back. You’ll be okay without me?”

“Yep,” she popped with a grin as she wrapped the towel around herself. She carefully opened the door and popped her head into the hallway, looking left and right before stepping out. She turned back toward him. “I .. I Iove you. You know that, yeah?”

“I do.” He petted in between his hearts. “They beat for you as well.”

“Back soon!”

He let out a sigh when the door snicked closed behind her. With a lift of his eyes, he tried to shake the image of her nakedness, and of the potential within the kiss they’d shared only moments ago. With a fast flick of his hand, he spun the hot water tap to run just cold water over him. He let out a long sigh and still fully clothed, he pressed his hands into the shower wall and let the ice-cold water beat down over his head and shoulders.

He would find a new outpost for his people. There was no way this lifestyle could continue – for either of them. He’d regenerate if this continued the way it was.

~~oooOOOOoo~~


	10. Field Trip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose and Romana talk the Doctor into joining them on a field trip with the kids. Braxiatel meets up with an old friend who has a dire warning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Braxiatel daydreaming about Leela and Narvin falling in love and wanting to get married, and then expressing his complete and utter reverence toward Romana and asking her to allow him the honour of her hand in marriage is probably the best damn thing I’ve heard in recent months. What a perfectly beautiful sap that man is. I actually went "awwwwwww ... you beautiful, daft, romantic man..." 
> 
> His cough and splutter upon being caught inside his own romantic daydream was beautiful.
> 
> Of course this is following the betrayal from bloody hell that he levered on the wonderful Romana... so it's likely his daydreams will have to stay daydreams... Still only on the 4th series .. not quite sure what happens next. Shipping them hard, people...
> 
> Damn, I fricking love the BF Gallifrey series…
> 
> Anyway, I fell in love with a character and decided he needed to come play too... I hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOOoo~~

The Doctor removed his glasses from his nose and set them on the tabletop ahead of him. With the fingers of both hands pressing into his eyes, he let out a sound of annoyance and ran his hands clear down his face toward his chin. The argument between Elrald and Phiroi had spanned at least twenty microspans, and there truly seemed to be no end in sight.

Gods, this is exactly why he had not wanted to take the High Council Presidential job on the three times he’d been offered the role. Was it three times; or more than that? Oh, he didn’t remember. Seemed that every time his shoes hit the surface of the planet he’d have someone waiting for him with a gilded skull cap and scarlet robe…

…Or a troop of guards carrying weapons bigger than themselves...

Dodging weapons with some fancy tongue work sprouting out well practiced lines of condescension and disgust was most definitely more interesting than this painfully droll exercise in trying to be bored to death. It was nothing but dull and boring non-productive arguing about the same things over and over again.

“Yes, yes,” he eked out through his teeth for what have been the fifth time in the last twenty microspans. “Phiroi is right, Elrald. The newly repaired and reactivated transduction barrier over Gallifrey will make it impossible for anyone to get through without detection.” He inhaled deeply and leaned back in his chair, drawing up a leg to lay his ankle on his knee. “And with each of the travel capsules here being deregistered on the CIA books, then we couldn’t get any of them anywhere near Gallifrey – at least not without some fancy jiggery-pokery being done to their navigational systems.” He huffed out. “And will someone please explain to me how you managed to find six deregistered capsules in the first place? It’s not like the CIA are deleting them from their systems and then just handing them off to anyone who wants one.”

Elrald gave him a sly smile. “You are aware that this outpost was created and pulled together by Cardinal Braxiatel, yes?”

The Doctor gave him a flat stare. “Yes. I am.”

“And you’re familiar with the ways in which old Brax works?”

The Doctor held up a hand. “Yes. Quite aware of how he operates, thank you. It still doesn’t explain just how he managed the procure six capsules from underneath the noses of the CIA.” He shrugged. “Brax is good, I’ll give him that much credit, but the CIA are specialists in covert operations and … well … and in not letting Gallifreyan technologies simply _disappear_.”

Phiroi lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “My experience with the Cardinal is that it’s best you don’t ask. He’ll procure anything you need to do whatever you need it to do. But his methods of procurement…” He grit his teeth in a guilty expression and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, they can do a number on one’s conscience. So don’t ask...”

“…And you don’t have to carry the guilt yourself,” the Doctor finished with a sigh. He held at his ankle with one had, drawing further down his thigh and leaned his other arm across the back of his chair. He pulled at his earlobe and pursed his lips in thought. “We’ve got no way to reach out to the Capitol and check on potential allies, do we?”

Elrald shook his aged head slowly. “After the incident that saw Gallifrey appear in the sky over London, and then your efforts to end the war and save our people, communication was completely cut for us.”

“Which is what happens when a planet is locked away inside an alternate pocket parallel,” Phiroi said with a shrug. “While a capsule can quite easily pass through the walls of reality, I’m afraid communication signals cannot.”

The Doctor lifted his eyes. “Yet Rassilon was able to send out a communication to Braxiatel’s capsule for retrieval.”

“Because old Rassilon has control over it, doesn’t he?” Elrald huffed. 

“That and there were residual links that could be utilised to make contact before the walls closed completely,” the Doctor muttered with a hand curled around his chin to border his lips with his thumb and index finger. He looked off to one side and spoke with a bit of a muffled voice. “The program I had to execute in each of the capsules took them so far offline, that they wouldn’t be able to find Gallifrey even if we were to actively encourage them to.”

“We don’t even know where it is right now,” Elrald admitted. His eyes shifted to the Doctor. “Until you admitted last week that you had no idea where you’d relocated the planet, we were under the assumption that you were our key for return.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor muttered with a curl of his fist to settle underneath his chin. “Assumptions being the mother of all fuck-ups, and all that…”

“A phrase I don’t quite understand,” Phiroi said with a lift in his brow. “But I suspect the term _fuck-up_ is negative.” The Doctor looked at him and spoke a series of Gallifreyan syllables that perfectly translated the term in the crudest wording possible inside their shared language. Phiroi’s eyes widened, and he had to smile. “Well. I must say. _Fuck-up_ is much simpler to say, isn’t it? I just may adopt its use myself.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor drawled long. “You might want to use it sparingly around the ladies. As you can tell, it’s hardly an appropriate word in the Human language.” He tipped his head to one side. “Versatile though it may be.”

“So no putting it on banners and flags as we storm the capitol?” Elrald teased gently.

The Doctor couldn’t help but snicker at the immediate mental image of Earth’s mighty F-Bomb being blazened across the lands of Gallifrey as a symbol of their fight. Throw in a couple of flipped- _birds_ , and it might come close to adequately describing how he felt about Rassilon and his leadership.

“Brilliant,” he muttered to himself with a smile.

A clamour of sudden noise from the hallway took the attentions of all three Time Lords from their discussion. They all looked through the archway toward the hall with brows seated high.

“By the will of Omega,” Phiroi muttered out almost painfully. “What is going on?”

The hallway was heavy with a thick throng of excited Gallifreyan children being guided and spoken to by the ladies of the household. None of the children, and each of the ladies, were dressed in their usual Gallifreyan attire of tunics and trousers or rag-style dresses. They were all suited up in clothing much more relative to Earth’s current fashion. Denim jeans in an array of colours, long-sleeved polo shirts and graphic tee’s were covered in jackets of varying styles and fabrics were worn by all of them. The women were all suited up in Earth fashion that seemed to perfectly fit the personalities of each. Only Romana and Rose seemed to have opted for blue denim topped with gentle flowing blouses covered with pea-coats and long flowing scarves whose ends kissed at the tops of their feet despite being looped delicately around their necks. The other ladies wore trousers or thick and warm ankle-length skirts, boots, and long jackets.

“Attention please,” Romana called out to the group as she rolled up onto her toes to try to look down the entire length of the hall, and into the capsule that held yet more children. “Thank you all for agreeing to come along on our excursion today. Lady Rose and myself are very excited to have the opportunity to escort you, along with our very dedicated volunteers, to what Humans refer to as a zoo.” There was cheer and excitement, and she held up her hands to ask for silence. “Please. Please. I’m not quite finished. Silence if you will.” She waited a moment and then smiled. “Our Lady Rose has arranged for ground transportation; what the Humans refer to as a School bus.” She looked to Rose. “That’s correct, yes?”

“It is,” Rose answered with a smile. She looked at her watch. “And the busses should be here shortly, so best we get this lot ready… and hope none of them get travel sickness.”

The Doctor didn’t get up from his seat – at some point he think he just might have grown roots and become permanently attached to it. He was twisted in the seat to look toward the group. “Rose?” he called out with curious concern. “Can you come here for a moment?”

Rose held her hand up to Romana, who granted her leave with a nod of her head. “Keep on getting this lot prepped,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll see what he wants.” There was a smile across her cheeks when she walked to him. She said nothing until she dropped down onto his thighs, seating herself across them, and curled her hands around the back of his neck. Her voice was playful. “Yes, Doctor?”

His hands automatically moved around her hips, one arm across her thighs, and his fingers locked lightly in a hold to keep her in place. “What are you and Romana up to?”

“Field trip,” she said with a beaming smile. “Taking the youngsters for a trip to the zoo.”

“When you say youngsters, you’re not just referring to Mark, Aly, and Clara, are you?”

“No,” she breathed out, taking her eyes from his for just a moment. “Taking a few more than just our three muskateers.”

“A few being?”

Rose lifted her eyes, with a pinch of thought in one of them. Her lips moved in a manner to suggest that she was counting. After a moment, she looked back down to him. “About two hundred and fifty of the little ones here, and fifty volunteers, mostly from the refugee numbers, but a few of Phiroi’s team are tagging along just in case.” She turned to look at the Lord with a smile on her face. “Thank you for approving that, by the way, Phiroi. I think they’re as excited to get out as the rest of us.”

“My pleasure,” he answered with a light tilt in his head. “Do ensure that their first-aid kits are adequately stocked before they leave.”

The Doctor looked around Rose toward Phiroi. “Hold on, you knew about this?” he looked up to Rose. “How come you didn’t tell me about it?”

She pulled her hands back from around his neck and touched the finger of one hand against the palm of the other. “There are two answers to that question, Doctor. One. I did.”

He shook his head. “No,” he sang out with a light bounce in his shoulders. “My recollection is that you mentioned that you and Romana were _thinking_ about pulling together a field trip with the youngsters. At which point I offered my protests against the idea of having a hoard of Gallifreyan children let loose in London…”

“Not exactly _let loose_ , Doctor,” she said with a sigh. “They have the supervision ratio of one-to-five, which is a better ratio than the public school system. We also have medical staff who can tend to any boo-boos. I’ve arranged for six school busses for transportation, and who will remain onsite for the entire duration of the trip, so if an emergency return is required, we can do that.”

“A travel capsule would be a much more reliable and trustworthy transportation option,” Elrald suggested with a firm tone. 

“Because a materialisation in a public area and then three hundred people exiting a cylinder that looks to fit only five won’t draw any attention at all,” Rose argued with a shrug. “Clown car, much?”

“The facetiousness of your counter remark is not appreciated,” Elrald muttered indignantly. “A polite reminder that your kind don’t have such technology would have sufficed.”

“But where’s the fun in that?” she asked with a shrug. She looked back to the Doctor. “The children are excited for this, Doctor. They really are. And how can we possibly deny their brilliant young minds the awe and wonder that exists on an alien planet? For most of them, this will be their only trip away from Gallifrey.”

“It’s not safe,” he breathed out.

“Yes it is,” she argued lightly. “Perfectly safe. Schools do trips like these all the time and no one gets hurt.” She tilted her head. “Or don’t you believe that Romana and I are capable of leading a trip of the same.” She looked to Romana, who was busy with Carein and the children. “I mean Romana used to lead an entire planet of people – Time Lords even – reckon she’s good to handle a few excited kids.”

“Oh,” he breathed out quickly. “I wholly believe the two of you could single handily wrangle an entire planet of rambunctious children without breaking a sweat.” He exhaled a breath. “It’s other people I’m worried about. How they’ll perceive a bunch of young alien children, and whether or not they’ll panic.”

“They won’t even know they’re not from Earth,” Rose said with a huff. “They’re ordinary children and look like ordinary children.” She gave him a look of challenge. “But if it’s so worrying for you and you think we’re all heading Gallifrey’s children into danger in the face of Humankind, then how about you join us?”

His eyes flashed wide with horror. “How ‘bout I do _what_?”

“Come with us,” she said with a beaming smile as though the suggestion was a new an exciting one. “Oh, it’ll be fun.”

He looked very uncomfortable with the suggestion. He leaned toward her and lowered his voice slightly. “You’re suggesting I help lead more than two hundred children on a field trip, Rose? Children? Me?” He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “No. Me and children. I – I don’t think that’s a very good combination. Don’t quite get along with them all that well.”

“You’re aware we have two of them, yeah?” She said flatly. “Boy and girl, both under the age of ten.”

“Well yes,” he agreed with a roll in his eyes and a nod of his head. “I’m aware of the existence of our children, both of whom you know are deeply seared inside my hearts and my soul. I like _them_. Of course, I do. Love them more than I do myself…”

“Which is an impressive feat,” she said with a laugh.

His eyes flashed her a playful warning. “But, Rose. Mark and Aly. They’re mine, they’re yours, they’re ours. We created those two beautiful children _together_ so they’re very special.” He looked to the hallway. “The rest of them. Oooooh,” He looked concerned. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t want to take a perfect opportunity to share your immense knowledge of the wonder of this world with the open and curious minds of youth?” She looked down and drew the tip of her finger along the small triangle of bare skin exposed through his Oxford, which hadn’t been buttoned up high enough to add his tie. “Who better in the entire universe to make sure those youngsters are captured and in awe of what they’re seeing, than you?”

Two things were happening here which were working in Rose’s favour. One, she was tickling his ego, his need to share the knowledge he’d gleaned over the centuries to very eager and curious minds. And two, she was tickling a very sensitive area of his chest with the tip of her very nimble finger.

Gods, if she kissed him now, he’d give in and agree to anything at all that her heart desired. He heard a chuckle in the back of her throat, and he knew she’d felt that across their bond. He had no time at all to even begin to form a defensive strategy against it before her lips pressed against his, and she coaxed him into a deeper connection with a parting of her mouth against his.

Trapped, and quite delightfully so, he gave in to the affection with a deep sigh. His arms snapped around her waist and he drew her up his thighs in toward his chest.

“You don’t play fair,” he murmured against her cheek when she separated their mouths to press tender kisses along his jaw and toward his ear.

“Come with us and prove to our beautiful children just how wonderful and brilliant their daddy is,” she whispered against his ear. “And you won’t have to sleep in the TARDIS tonight.”

He was up on his feet so quickly that Rose let out a startled yelp. The only reason she didn’t fall off his lap and land in an undignified heap on the floor underneath the table was because he still held his arm protectively across her back. She managed to get her feet on the floor and stabilise herself quickly enough that when he released her, she remained on her feet.

“Right,” he said with a clap of his hands in a slightly strangled tone toward the other Lords at the table. “You’ll have to excuse me from the rest of this rather painful yawn fest you’ve had me engaged in for the past thirty-nine microspans.” He adjusted the seat of his trousers and swept his coat from the back of his chair. “My wife and children need me to accompany them today, and it would be rather remiss of me to deny them that desire.”

Phiroi wore a smile of amusement, Elrald was less amused and more affronted by the display. Phiroi lifted a hand in a wave. “Enjoy your day,” he wished them. “I know I’ll enjoy the relative silence of it, myself.”

The Doctor grabbed a tight hold of his wife’s hand. “Well? Come on, Rose! Those eager young minds of Gallifrey’s children won’t wait for us forever!” He walked them to the hallway. “Mark. Alirra, darling. Guess who’s coming along on our trip today!”

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Irving Braxiatel leaned up against the thick trunk of a towering willow tree in quiet wait. Dressed in a thick and warm pair of black Chino trousers topped with a deep royal blue Oxford shirt with the two top buttons undone, he didn’t quite feel the chill of a late winter’s day. His physiology being what it was, he rarely did feel the cold, but for aesthetics, he did opt to add a black cashmere coat with blue scarf – if only to blend in with the human populous that milled around the area. 

It had been a few weeks since he had last set foot on English soil, and so the drab grey skies and damp atmosphere of London did serve to depress him just slightly. It wasn’t quite as brutally frigid as the Canadian climate had offered him only last week, but at least in Canada there was some sunshine to make the white landscape almost bearable.

He sipped at the Orange Pekoe tea with milk and sugar he’d purchased at a local coffee stand from a tall paper travel cup and looked across the yellowed, muddy grasses of the parkette that surrounded him. He imagined this park would be lush and lovely during the warmer months, but he couldn’t quite see it as being anything but dead and droll in the dead of winter.

“I got your message,” an unamused and almost regal sounding voice crooned from his side. “And I’m here. What is it you want?”

He turned with a wide and very fake smile on his face and handed across a second cup toward his visitor. “Coordinator,” he practically sang out. “What a pleasure to see you again.”

Coordinator Narvin wore his typical expression of displeasure as he looked toward the paper cup being held toward him. While he said nothing, the suspicion in his eyes spoke volumes of distrust toward Braxiatel.

“It’s tea,” Braxiatel said with a huff and a thrust of the cup toward him. “A favourite hot beverage of the inhabitants of this land. It’s not going to kill you.”

“You’ll have to forgive my apprehension,” he admitted blandly. “So, thank you, but no thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug as he flicked the full cup into a half-full rubbish bin a good two metres from where they stood. He let himself smirk as Narvin moved back just slightly as though expecting it to spark and splutter or explode. His expression fell toward confusion. “Is there any reason as to why you’re so … how should I say it … timid?”

“Cautious,” Narvin corrected quickly. 

“Quite unlike you,” Braxiatel offered. “To act as cautious as a _loomling_ stepping outside for the first time.”

“Just get to what it is you want, Braxiatel,” Narvin said with a huff. “I’m not entirely comfortable being here, on this planet. Particularly as Council have classified Sol-III out of bounds to all Time Lords and have it on permanent watch.”

“Have they now?” he bit at the edge of his cup in a smile. “Well, that _is_ interesting.”

“I figured you’d think so.”

“And just why is old Rassilon so interested in this insignificant rock?”

“A list that is long and extremely varied,” Narvin replied. “The top of that list being the preferred planet for you and your renegade brother to hide out on.” 

“Is that all?”

Narvin shook his head. “No. It isn’t.” he looked around him as though checking for a Time Lord hiding in a bush.

“I’ve got a scanner on the area,” Braxiatel advised him. “In case you’re wondering. If any off world creature happens to come within eavesdropping distance, I’ll know.” He looked at him. “And that includes scanning devices designed to listen in.”

“I should have expected that,” he admitted dryly.

“So tell me,” Braxiatel asked him after another sip of his tea. “Why is it that old Rassilon is watching over Earth if it doesn’t involve Thete’s and my preference as a holiday destination?”

“He believes that there is a revolutionary force opposed to his rule being pulled together on this planet. He’s concerned that there will be an uprising and challenge for his presidency in the near future and that it will come from this planet. So, he has employed the CIA to monitor all timeline distortions and artron waves in the area.” 

“Well, he wouldn’t be wrong about a revolution being planned,” Braxiatel said with a shrug. “That’s true of any presidency, isn’t it?”

“As we’ve learned, even the most beloved of Presidents have their dissenters creating plots to overthrow their term.” He blinked and looked across the field toward an animal enclosure in the distance. There was a light smile on his face. “So you know. Rassilon is still smarting from the defeat he suffered here several spans ago at the hands of you and your brother.”

“Yes, I would imagine so,” Braxiatel purred out. “And I must thank you for your forewarning of what was on approach. Had we not been given advanced notice…”

Narvin held up his hand. “Best you don’t mention it. And in that I mean: _Ever_.” He adjusted the thick coat that he’d pulled over the top of his black and white tunic and trouser set. “By the Gods it’s cold here, isn’t it?”

Braxiatel shrugged. “Don’t feel it, myself. I suspect it’s because I’ve spent so much time here, or that it was at least thirty degrees colder where I was only two days ago.”

“I need you to reach your point and tell me just what it is you want from me, Braxiatel,” Narvin huffed out with a light chatter in his teeth. “I broke so many protocols to meet with you. Risked my own safety to fly in underneath any radar on Gallifrey…”

“You’re CIA,” Braxiatel said with a laugh. “I didn’t know you actually _had_ protocols.”

“None that would apply to the typical Gallifreyan at any rate,” he answered with a shrug. “But yes. We do have _protocols_ of sorts – if you want to call it that.”

“As for flying in underneath any kind of radar,” he muttered. “I thought you and yours operated low enough that you couldn’t be detected by any radar on any world – even the ground sensing ones.”

“As if you function on any higher level that I do,” he growled in reply. “Really, Braxiatel. Is this back and forth truly necessary? Get to your point, if you think you might actually have one.”

“I need your help,” Braxiatel half murmured, discomforted by the admission.

“Wow,” Narvin breathed out. “That must’ve been painful for you to admit.”

“You have no idea,” he intoned blandly. “And I’d much rather appreciate you not focusing too hard on the fact that I need your help versus just what kind of assistance I’m actually looking for.”

“And what might that be?”

Braxiatel straightened up. He looked across the field, rather than at his fellow Time Lord. “I need you to transport me back to Gallifrey and keep me hidden while I’m there.”

The answer was immediate. “No.”

Braxiatel snapped a look of surprise toward him. “What do you mean _no_?”

“I mean no as in I won’t help you,” he answered firmly. “Not that difficult a concept for you to understand, I would hope.” His brows lifted and he shrugged. “Then again…”

“I need to get back to Gallifrey,” Braxiatel demanded. “And without you, I can’t get there.”

“What could you possibly want to return to Gallifrey _for_?” he asked sharply. “There’s nothing there for you anymore. You are no longer Time Lord, you don’t have any official title or rank, even your family home has been razed.” He leaned in to Braxiatel and lowered his voice somewhat in warning. “Rassilon has ordered the execution of yourself and your brother if either of you are spotted. No trial, Braxiatel. No chance to defend yourself. We are to use lethal force against the both of you.”

Braxiatel’s voice was a stunned whisper. “What? But he can’t make that order. It goes against…” he exhaled. “Oh. Yes, of course, it’s a CIA directive, isn’t it?”

“The only ones who he can put those orders to and expect them to be followed,” Narvin said with a nod. “And you, Brax. You don’t have any regenerations left in you to try and challenge those orders. If I take you back to Gallifrey, I take you back to a very inglorious and painful death.” He shook his head. “And I won’t do that.”

“I’m flattered you care,” he huffed.

“Not really,” he said with a shrug. “But it’s this conscience of mine, it just nags and nags at me…”

“This kill directive,” he asked after a moment. “An order passed throughout the entirely of the CIA?”

“I had no choice but to issue the order,” he admitted. “Shortly after the final days of the war, after your brother ended the war, I was ordered to issue directives to all CIA agents no matter their rank or function; those on, and those stationed outside of Gallifrey. If someone is connected to the Agency in any way at all, then they know the order and are bound to follow it.”

“Except you,” he ventured.

“I really don’t like to get my hands dirty,” he answered flatly. “And while I might be inclined to step around the order, I can’t guarantee you that you’ll find any of our operatives that would do the same. Rassilon not only founded the agency, he’s our resurrected Lord President. They won’t go against him.”

“I see.”

“So that said: Returning you to Gallifrey for whatever hair-brained reason you’ve convinced yourself you need to return for is not something I’m going to agree to.” He looked toward him with concern on his face. “If and when you do return, it will have to be with an army behind you, Braxiatel. It’s the only hope you have for survival.”

“Who says that I’m looking to survive it?”

Narvin had to snort out a laugh at that. “You’re Irving Braxiatel,” he reminded him. “Far too in love with your presence in the universe to want to be taken out of it.” Any shadow of a smile he had shifted to a frown. “And I’m fairly certain that your mate would be most unhappy to know you’re actively on the hunt for your own demise.”

Braxiatel’s eyes lifted high and he exhaled. “Romana would be far better off without me.”

“If you expect me to believe that pathetic drivel, then you’re mistaken,” he gruffed out. “As far as you’re concerned no one is better off without you – least of all Romana.” He looked across the distance again. “Long before she accepted your proposal to become mates, she needed you, Braxiatel. Trust me when I say her need for you by her side during her more desperate moments was quite obvious to us all.” 

“She regenerated,” he admitted quietly. “And it was my fault.”

“Doesn’t come as much of a surprise,” he said with a shrug. “had to happen sooner or later.”

“She regenerated because I’m not able to regenerate any longer,” he said with a growl in his voice. “Rassilon took away my ability to regenerate, and almost immediately afterward we found ourselves in a position where one of us had to give up a life.”

Narvin winced a deep frown. “Oh, Hell.”

“Romana took on that responsibility because I wasn’t able to,” Braxiatel continued. “She died, Narvin. The woman my hearts beat for died right in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.” He grit his teeth together a moment, dimpling his cheek with the force of his bite. “I blame Rassilon, and I intend on making that resurrected idiot pay the highest price possible for what happened.”

“By dying at his hand, yourself,” Narvin mumbled with a roll in his eyes and a growl in his voice. “You ask me, Braxiatel, you’re the fool moreso than him if that’s what’s driving you to return to Gallifrey.” He inhaled hard. “And really, as much as I would like to see you put in your place by the old fool…And by the Gods, that is one of my daytime fantasies.”

“Then you should have been with Thete, Romana, and I during the Rassilon incident,” he smirked out one side of his mouth. “All of your dreams come true with one point of his mighty staff.”

“If the thought of going into your mind didn’t disgust me so thoroughly, I’d seek a brief contact to take a look for myself.” He shook his head and reached into a pocket of his tunic. He retrieved a small communication device and held it to him. “Here. Take this.”

Braxiatel took the device and turned it in his hands. “What is this.” His eyes lifted. “Well yes, I know that it’s a communicator before you offer a unpleasant retort.”

“That’s a secure way for you and Romana to reach out to me if you need to,” he offered with a look toward the device. “If either of you find yourself in a situation that you think I can possibly assist with, then use that to get me. I can only shield so much, Braxiatel. If you keep insisting on using your original communicator to reach me, you will be found.”

“Communication does go both ways,” Braxiatel reminded him.

“It does,” he agreed. 

“Then I’ll expect you to use it if you learn that your CIA sniffer dogs have caught our scent,” he demanded flatly. “Especially if they find Thete or Romana. There’s so much more at stake if any of your operatives find the two of them.”

Narvin looked slightly confused by that. “You’re not with them right now?”

Braxiatel shook his head. “Haven’t been for quite a while now – since Romana’s regeneration.” He shook the communicator in his hand with slow movements. “Can’t bear the thought of it being my fault.”

“I suppose I can understand that,” Narvin offered supportively. His attempt at support then shifted to incredulity. “What am I saying? No I don’t. For the Gods, man. You abandoned Romana directly following a regeneration? Are you truly that ignorant?” his eyes were wide but fell toward annoyance. “What am I saying? Look who I’m talking to, of course you are. I think it might be back on the cards for me to return you to Gallifrey. You’re probably safer there than you are if Romana finds you.”

“She’s the one who exiled me,” he admitted with a shrug. “For not quite playing by her rules…”

“Who did you level a betrayal on this time?”

“Ahhh,” he breathed out. “That would be Thete’s mate. Although I will counter that it was as much a life saving effort for her as it was a means to an end for my purpose.” He exhaled. “Although try explaining that to my brother. Unreasonable pig-rat that he can be.” He pursed his lips. “Granted, it must’ve looked a little on the side of extreme from his viewpoint. However, my hearts really do hold that precious woman so very tightly within them. Surely he knows that.”

Narvin shook his head. “Just when I think you’ve changed, Braxiatel, I find that you haven’t changed at all.”

“Meaning?”

He shook his head. “Nothing that would be at all complimentary, so never mind.” He gestured toward the communicator. “If your brother and Lady Romana are at risk, then I’d suggest you give that to her, or make sure she knows to find you to reach out to me.” He looked across the grounds again. “Because I really don’t know for how long I can possibly hold any of them off. For now, all CIA operatives are required to reach out to me directly with any word on yours or your brother’s whereabouts – or of the possible location of this resistance group that Rassilon seems to fear so much.”

Braxiatel nodded, but said nothing.

“But I imagine they’ll start to go above my head to Rassilon directly if their information is good enough to warrant a reward of sorts.” He shrugged. “At that point, all of you are on your own.”

Braxiatel didn’t look up. “And if this resistance movement does happen to exist,” he asked cautiously. “And one or more members looked to reach out to you for assistance toward their cause?”

“You’re asking where my loyalty lies, Braxiatel?”

“Perhaps.”

“The winning side,” he answered with a smirk. 

”Of course.”

A shrill sound sounded inside Braxiatel’s pocket. He gasped with startlement and juggled Narvin’s communicator a couple of times before finally snaring it firmly in his hold. “That’s the scanner,” he remarked worriedly with a lift of his head to look around as he pulled it form his pocket. He looked down with a crease in his brow. “Narvin. Do you know of any forces being dispatched to Earth?”

He shook his head with rapid movements. “No. Absolutely not.” 

“This is picking up multiple alien lifeforms,” he breathed out worriedly. “Bioscan has all of them identified as Gallifreyan.” His lip lifted and he let out a growl. “All that, for me?” His eyes lifted to the sky. “Overkill, Rassilon, don’t you think?”

He looked over Braxiatel’s shoulder and let out a breath. “By the Gods, there are hundreds of them.” He lifted his hands into his shortly cropped hair. “What in Omega is Rassilon thinking? This is a family venue, filled with Human young. They can’t defend against a troop of Gallifreyan soldiers.”

“Then I’ll have to go quietly,” Braxiatel offered. “You get out of here, Narvin. Escape while you can.”

“If they know you’re here,” he said with a sniff. “Then they know I’m here with you. Otherwise how else did they find you?”

“You’re supposed to be a spy,” Braxiatel remarked with a sneer. “The top spy of all the spies. All that time at the Capitol make you forget how to be covert, did you?”

He shifted the left black line of fabric that hung over one shoulder in search of his weapon. He grunted out a sound of annoyance on realising that one gun against a troop of Gallifreyan soldiers in a public park was a stupid, fool decision to make.

“Down together then,” Braxiatel offered.

“I hate you.”

“You flatter me.”

Both men stood in their own respective postures of defiance as a large grouping of people rounded the corner. The group consisted of mostly children, walking four-by-four, and each of them holding hands. 

Narvin’s face tightened up with absolute and utter confusion. “Children?” he looked to Braxiatel. “Gallifreyan children? What are Gallifreyan children doing here on Earth?”

For his part, Braxiatel’s eyes were wide on the group. He had a fairly good idea of just where this group of children originated from, even without seeing the five people that he cared most about in the universe at the lead of them all. 

“What are they doing?” he breathed to himself, annoyance in his tone. “This is not safe. I don’t approve of this.”

“You know about this, Braxiatel?” Narvin asked with light darkness in his tone. While he didn’t immediately recognise any member of the group, he got a sense in his mind that Romana and the Doctor were part of the grouping. “I can sense Romana and your brother in that pack.”

“At the lead of them, actually,” he answered with his own level of annoyance. “I’d really like to know whose idea it was to put together a field trip for the children.”

“This is …This can’t be right,” Narvin said with worry. “There are hardly any children left at all on Gallifrey, there’s no way there would be any permissions granted for a field trip to Earth – especially not for a grouping this large.” 

Braxiatel let out a breath. “Narvin, let me explain.”

Narvin looked toward him, his eyes wide and his posture slouched in worry and horror. “By the Gods, Braxiatel. What have you done?”

Braxiatel didn’t answer his friend. His eyes were locked onto the breathtaking image of his mate with a baby attached to a carrier on her chest and a smile of utter pleasure on her face as his nephew held her hand and chatted excitedly to her. She caught hold of his presence and her head lifted slowly from the young boy. From across more than 25 metres her eyes captured his and she stilled.

His hearts seized inside his chest to see her mouth his name before covering her mouth in her hand.   
  


Her name was on his mind and a whisper of her name passed quietly through his lips.

“Romana.”

~~ooooOOOOooo~~


	11. Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax and Romana reunite.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a total of one hour to write today. one hour. this was all I could scramble up in that time to be able to continue along my weekday everyday posting...
> 
> Basically, this is just a chapter of absolute fluff. Figured I needed it (not sure that you all do), because things are coming and I need to prep myself for it. and I realised that a reunion of two is also a reunion of more than just two.... groan...
> 
> And please don't hate on Brax. I just wanna preface this by saying that.

~~ooooOOOOooo~~

Stepping down the steep and narrow stairs of what had to have been the single most uncomfortable mode of transportation she’d ever taken, Romana found herself having to take care not to stumble the last step from the bus to the curb. She held her arm protectively over the sleeping bundle drooling a rather impressive damp spot in between her breasts and paused at the bottom to take the hand of her young nephew.

Mark hadn’t stopped talking since the moment he’d chosen to share one of the bench seats with her back at the house. He spoke a mix of Gallifreyan and English and spoke so rapidly that at times she found it difficult to keep up. The gesturing wave of his arms at times had her having to cover young Clara against her chest to protect her from being an unfortunate and very unintentional recipient of an errant hand swat.

His gesturing did stop when he took her hand and they stepped aside to allow the other children to step off the bus.

“They’re gonna love it,” Mark huffed happily. “This place is awesome.”

“You’ve been here before?” she asked him curiously. To the best of her knowledge there hadn’t been any trips to the zoo – but who knew what Rose did with them during the day when she and Brax were back on Gallifrey.

“Course!” he cheered. “Tonza Brax brought me here before Christmas. Took me out of school and we made a day of it.” He leaned in to speak with conspiratorial tones. “He got upset with the headmaster during a meeting, said he was a…” he leaned up to whisper a couple of words in her ear, to which she gasped with surprise and then laughed.

“Don’t let your mother hear you say that,” she warned him lightly. She tugged on his hand to walk the lead of the group across the carpark toward the parkette that would lead them to the entrance of the zoo. “But, yes. I can see him using that term, and rather indelicately too...”

“Said it right to his face!” Mark said with a laugh and a stomp of his feet. “Brilliant,” he huffed.

“What’s brilliant?” his father asked him curiously as he moved in beside the pair. He held Alirra up on his shoulders, her legs hung down over each shoulder, and her arms were wrapped tightly around his forehead. One hand he held at her knee to keep her steady, the other he had wrapped around Rose’s hand. 

“Your brother admonishing your son’s school headmaster,” Romana offered with a smile. “In his typical no nonsense, indignant manner.”

“This was the one before Christmas?” Rose asked. At Romana’s nod, she exhaled a long-suffering sigh and looked upward. “God, _that_ was a phone call and a half, wasn’t it? I’ve never had to issue such urgent damage control in my life.”

“What happened?” the Doctor queried with a single brow held high.

Rose looked down to her child, who held a wide smile at the memory. “And it’s not something for you to be smiling about, young man. It was mortifying.” She looked to the Doctor. “Mark came home with a black eye one day after getting into a scuffle with a little bully in the playground. And of course, Brax hit the roof, didn’t he? He stormed the school all full of piss and vinegar first thing the next day.” She rubbed her brow. “Which wouldn’t have been so bad … had he not regenerated only a couple of weeks beforehand.”

He knew that he should be aghast, but instead the Doctor belched out a laugh. 

“Not funny!” she whined out. “The school already knew his previous incarnation from him storming in there on previous occasions. So, without thinking about the fact that he’s a completely different looking bloke now, he goes in all _Brax_ demanding to see the headmaster. And, _well_ , they’ve got no clue who he is, do they? He’s losing his mind on the lot of them, calling them a bunch of primitive apes who hadn’t made it past the Neolithic era so how could he possibly trust them to adequately educate a child of Time, made a threat about going back in time and making sure they are never existed – or _something_. Then he insulted the headmaster and left with Mark.” She groaned. “I had to make up a story that he was another uncle that had gone off his meds and was on a day pass from the local looney-bin and that no mind, he’ll be going back there quick-smart.”

Mark looked up at Romana. He had an amused grin on his face. “That’s why I had to go to a new school, because Tonza-Brax refused to apologise and he got banned from being on school grounds.”

Romana stooped down just lightly with a laugh on her lips. She held back her comment when she heard the Doctor comment over her shoulder.

“Well. _Speak_ of the Devil,” he breathed out in a less than thrilled tone of voice. “Braxiatel. And is he with … _Narvin_?”

Romana’s eyes lifted before she considered pulling up out of her stoop. She did so very slowly when she caught sight of Braxiatel in the near distance. Their bond inside her mind tugged gently and she felt both of her hearts inside her chest pull forward. She breathed out his name and covered her mouth with a delicate hand.

Rose moved to her quickly, holding out her hands for the child strapped to her chest. “Go to him, Romana. Let me take Clara.”

“Yes,” she answered distractedly. “Yes, of course.” She took her eyes off her husband for only long enough to unclip the child from the carrier on her chest and hand her across to Rose. Then without preamble, she moved quickly up the embankment toward where Braxiatel stood in wait.

As she closed the very short distance between them, several scenarios of just what she was going to do when she finally stood in front of him for the first time in several weeks ran though Romana’s mind. Yelling at him came first, as did a good slap across his face for worrying her so much. Stopping just in front of him with her arms folded angrily across her chest and her eyes narrowed with silent and powerful nonverbal admonishment certainly made its way to the top of the list.

Gods, but she wanted to see him squirm uncomfortably and splutter out almost nonsensical words of apology and explanation. He needed to fall to a knee and beg her forgiveness for running away like he did.

And so he should. He had so much to make up for.

Despite her plans to bring this man to his knees, however, Romana’s stride didn’t slow when she neared him. Her arms did not find their way across her chest, and her eyes did not narrow. She stalked toward him without slowing until her chest was up against his. Her hands lifted up high into his hair, her thumbs against his temples, and without a word at all, she pulled his face down to hers.

His arms snapped tightly around her before their lips met, one arm across her lower back, and the other reaching up the entire length of her spine to cup at the back of her head. He dipped dipper her backward just slightly and claimed her mouth just as fiercely as she had claimed him.

At their side, Narvin’s face fell into an expression of discomfort. He slid his hands into his trouser pockets and puckered his lips into a silent whistle as he looked anywhere else but at the two of them. The toe of his boot shuffled into the slippery mud at his feet as he counted off the period of time in his head that would be considered adequate for the two of them to complete their greeting.

It didn’t end anywhere quickly enough for him and his peripheral vision wouldn’t lose sight of their rolling jaws, the shifting movement of their heads to maintain contact, and the tightening hold of Braxiatel’s arms around Romana’s back. When a low growl rumbled inside Braxiatel’s chest, Narvin finally let out a displeased moan.

“Oh for Rassilon’s sake,” he muttered with a disgusted curl in his lip. “If you wouldn’t mind. There _are_ children present.”

“Give them a minute,” the Doctor advised with humour in his voice and his hands deep inside his trouser pockets as he completed his own slow lumbering walk up the short embankment. “They haven’t seen each other in several spans.”

“It’s indecent,” Narvin muttered disgustedly under his breath.

“It’s just a kiss,” the Doctor argued with a roll in his eyes. “With Brax’s complete and utter disdain for anything more _primal_ than that, I don’t expect it will move much further. Just give them a moment.”

“They’ve had their moment, Lord Doctor,” he muttered. “But as the pair of them seem to want this indecency to continue, I’ll make my leave. Do offer my farewells.”

“Heading back to Gallifrey?” the Doctor asked with a tilt in his head and a hard look in his eyes that betrayed the rather relaxed posture of him.

“I would think that obvious, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he drawled out with a rub at the back of his head. “Of course, your reason for being here isn’t so obvious, and I’m rather curious about that.”

“Your bro… I mean to say, _Braxiatel_ , asked to meet.” He smiled. “And so, I obliged. Nothing more than that, I assure you.”

He pursed his lips. “As the Coordinator of the CIA, I would expect you’d be a bit too busy for a _social_ call with a non-Time Lord. Don’t you have…” He twirled his hand in front of his shoulder and rolled his eyes at the same time. “Well. Don’t you have _spy_ things to do, illicit intelligence to gather, time events to intervene in and other nefarious deeds specific to your group?”

“The only time interventionalist on this planet, Lord Doctor, is _you_ ,” he replied flatly, but with a smile on his face. “Do be wary of the accusations you make and the disgust in which you make them – particularly when you are just as guilty of all charges as I am.”

A chorus of song from a planet more than two hundred and fifty million light years away in the voices of more than two hundred children ghosted almost eerily up the embankment toward them. Soft trills, and vocal flutters sang lyrics filled with ancient words or awe and wonder.

The Doctor looked down at the group of children, all seated on the cement walkway, led in their song by one of the women of the Southern Mountains. Her arms swept through the air and she joined them in song. His eyes fell to his wife seated on the concrete beside their son. His daughter was seated in between the fold of Rose’s legs, little Clara held across the fold of her own little legs. All of them sang along along with a sway in their shoulders.

It was the most beautiful song he’d ever heard.

“The song of Gallifrey,” the Doctor breathed out with awe. “The anthem to the beauty of our planet and her marriage to time.” 

“I haven’t heard that since before I joined the academy,” Narvin admitted softly. “I don’t even know if I remember all of the words, myself.” He let out a small laugh. “I didn’t know they still taught it to the youngsters.”

“Outside of the capitol they do,” Romana said gently at his side. “The elders of the outerworld tell stories of ancient Gallifrey and teach the children songs to bring them closer to our world. And that’s never been more important to the people than it has been over these past few centuries of war. When I’m here on Earth, I hear this sang through the hallways and in the residence capsules quite often. And as broken as my hearts became as the war drew on, the sound of the children singing this song reminded me of just what it was we were really fighting for.” There was a small smile on her face. “It wasn’t a fight over _Time_. It wasn’t a fight for the _Time Lords_ and their power over tempering the chaos of the universe. It was a fight for _Gallifrey_. For our people. We lost sight of that as time moved and the skies over Gallifrey darkened with Daleks and weapon fire.”

The Doctor nodded with agreement. “The fight became less about protecting Gallifrey and her people and more about protecting the capitol and Rassilon’s determination to maintain control over time.”

“His control over the universe itself,” Narvin said darkly. “Control of which he is trying to restate to the time Lords.” He exhaled a breath. “Difficult given Gallifrey’s current location outside of N-Space, but it is only a matter of time before he and the council find a way out of the pocket universe.”

Romana turned toward the Coordinator and gave him a pleasant smile of greeting. “Narvin. It is good to see you again. My apology for not immediately acknowledging you.”

“No, no, My Lady President,” he assured her. “Perfectly understand your need to reassert your bond with your somewhat suicidal mate.”

“My what?” she asked with a gasp of shock and a quick glance toward Braxiatel. “What did he just say?”

“An over exaggeration, my dear,” he assured her with a look of warning over the top of her head toward Narvin. “Isn’t it?”

“Not exactly,” he replied with a flat stare of his own. His eyes shifted to Romana. “There are few people in this universe that I won’t lie to, Romana, you being one of them.” His eyes flicked up to Braxiatel. “This idiot is planning to making a return to Gallifrey, alone, to stand face to face with Rassilon, knowing full well that he won’t survive an encounter of any kind.”

“Coordinator Narvin,” Braxiatel growled out on a low voice. “How _could_ you?”

“No, Braxiatel,” Romana corrected with a growl of her own. “How could _you_?” She spun toward him with anger in her eyes. “Is this what you’ve been doing these past few weeks? Have you _really_ been trying to find passage back to Gallifrey to confront Rassilon? Alone?”

“I was very angry at him,” he said to her after a swallow. “He took everything from me, Romana. He stole every part of me with one wave of his staff.” He settled his features to his typical adoring charm and stroked at her chin with his thumb. “When you rejected me, I was completely bereft and felt I had no choice but to avenge everything.”

“I never rejected you,” she corrected him firmly. “I only asked for a moment to myself. I do believe that after the events of that evening, I could be afforded _that_ much from you.”

“And now that I properly understand that, I can forgo my plans for a return to Gallifrey,” he vowed as he snatched her into a tight hug against his chest. 

“And that’s all, then, Brax?” she queried. “This foolish game of yours that you’ve been playing these past few weeks, is over?”

“Indeed, my hearts,” he promised in a soft voice against her ear. “Nothing else. Nothing for you to have to worry about from here.” His eyes quickly shot to his brother and held a stern warning within them for him to not say a word about what he knew. “Not about _me_ , at any rate.”

Both Narvin and the Doctor lifted their eyes to the towering tree canopy above their heads. “Does an honest word ever come out of his mouth?” Narvin asked the Doctor on a quiet voice.

“How to know Brax is lying,” the Doctor muttered. “When he opens his mouth.”

There was a squeal of excitement and cheers of two children across the grasses. Braxiatel pulled away from Romana and took a step into the path of the kids, opening his arms to receive them both. Alirra launched up into his arms, Mark simply curled around his hip with a tight hug. Both children yelled excitedly in greeting of their uncle, and he returned their excitement with happy affection of his own. He seemed to thrill in the clumsy, peppered kisses on his face from the young girl while he leaned down to one side to listen to his nephew excitedly speaking in rapid Gallifreyan about how much they’d missed him.

Narvin watched with wide eyes. “Well. That’s unexpected. Who would have assumed that anyone would be so happy to see him?” He shrugged. “Children. I suppose they really don’t know any better, do they?” He looked to the Doctor, and toward the young blonde … Human … who curled up against his side. “Yours, I take it?”

“They are,” Rose offered somewhat sheepishly with a stretch in her lips. “I’m very sorry about their interruption, but I could only hold the two of them off for so long.” She looked up to the Doctor and smiled when he dipped his head to press a tender kiss against her mouth. She licked at her lip to taste the flavour of his chapstick. “Are you going to need some more time, Doctor? The children are eager to go inside.”

The Doctor nodded. “Yeah, I suppose we should go.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” she said quickly. “You guys can stay here and talk with your friend. I’ll head in with the youngsters. Meet you at the primate exhibit, and you can tell the little ones how my people aren’t as far evolved from the apes as we like to think we are, yeah?” 

“Thanks, Rose,” he said with a nod. “Won’t be long, I promise.”

She stepped out of his hold and held out her hand to Narvin. “I’m Rose, by the way.” She tipped her ear to the Doctor. “The biologically inferior other half to this one.”

“Never living that one down, am I?” He groused playfully.

“Not when you keep mentioning it, you won’t.” She looked back at the newcomer with a smile. “Sorry. Again, I’m Rose.”

“Coordinator Narvin,” he replied with a light dip of his head in polite greeting. “It’s a pleasure, my Lady.”

“Coordinator of what?” she asked with wide eyes. “Or have you gone with a _The_ name like the Doctor and Brax?”

“The?” he queried with a pinch of confusion in his brow. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

“Yeah,” she said with a smile. “ _The_ Doctor. _The_ Cardinal _._ Are you _The_ Coordinator?”

“Ahhh,” he breathed out. “No. I am actually a Coordinator. I’m with the Celestial Intervention Agency. I lead the Agency, actually.”

Rose seemed surprised by that. She looked to the Doctor with wide eyes. “Oh? Like your friend,” she breathed out. “And the group from Eotune.”

“How do you know about Eotune?” Narvin asked carefully.

“Just came back from there, oh, a week ago. The missus and I dropped in to say hello… literally dropped in, if I recall it correctly.” Narvin made an uncomfortable sound and the Doctor lifted a brow. “I’m sorry, was that a secret? _Well_. Not a very well kept one was it?”

“If you’re a smart Lord,” he warned. “You’ll stay away from Eotune, or any other CIA stronghold you think you might know about.”

He hummed and rubbed at his chin. “Yeah. See. Thing about me, Coordinator, is that if I’m specifically told to stay away from something, then my curiosity gets a little peaked.” He smirked. “Makes me want to stick my nose in a little deeper.”

“For your own safety,” he warned darkly. “And for the safety of your mate and offspring. Steer clear and keep yourself out of CIA business. As far away as you can.”

“Is that a threat, Coordinator?”

“It’s a warning,” he answered with a sigh as he held up his hand. “That’s all.”

Rose hummed out a sound and shook her head at the pair of them. “Are Time Lords ever supposed to get along with each other?” She held up a hand. “Don’t bother answering that, I already know the answer, ta.” She strode up to Braxiatel, her face alight with happiness to see him. “Brax!” she peeped out happily with a skip before she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him into a hug, one which he tightly reciprocated almost immediately. “God. I’ve missed you.”

“And you too, Rose,” he breathed against her ear. “So very much. You _and_ the children.”

She pulled out of the hug and put her hands over each of his hearts. “So? Are you home now?”

“Only for a day or two,” he said quietly. “Then I have to go again to finalise a few things that might take a few days.” He ran his hands over her hair, and then held her face in his hands. “Can we talk a little later? I believe there are a few things left open that we need to discuss, about… About _that_ night.”

She gave him a smile and rolled up onto her toes to kiss him lightly and chastely on the edge of his mouth. “Of course.” She pulled back and dropped her hands to take the hands of her children. “Come on you pair of little tearaways. Race you both back to the group. First one there gets icecream when we get inside!”

“Are you going to tell her, then?” Romana asked him quietly as they watched Rose and the two youngsters cheering excitedly as they ran down the embankment toward the group. “She doesn’t know, and it’s probably best she doesn’t.”

“I should tell her,” he answered quietly. “She needs to know.” He inhaled deeply. “And she certainly needs to know _why_.”

“That’s unlike you,” she remarked inside a whisper. “To be honest, and upfront with your transgressions.”

“Yes, it is,” he answered. “Isn’t it?”

“And speaking of,” Narvin interrupted. “Would anyone care to let me know just what is going on here? Why there is a group of more than two hundred Gallifreyan children on a field trip on Earth?”

The Doctor sniffed and looked toward his brother. “Can he be trusted?”

Braxiatel shrugged. “Quite likely not.”

“If it comes to the children of Gallifrey and their safety,” he argued. “Then I most certainly can.” He drew in a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “Braxiatel. Does this have anything to do with the six travel and medical capsules you had me deregister from the CIA registry for you during the War?”

The Doctor’s eyes widened. “ _You_ did that?” he rubbed at the back of his head. “Well, that answers _that_ question, then, doesn’t it?”

“I’d much rather it didn’t become common knowledge, Lord Doctor,” he said on a flat voice. 

“I’m curious to know how you pulled it off, though,” he remarked. “One capsule would be easy to sneak through the system, but six?”

“Each of the machines were close to being decommissioned and cannibalised for parts, anyway,” he said with a fold of his arms across his chest. There was a look of distaste on his face. “I’m not one for stripping bare a grieving sentient ship just for spare parts.” He sniffed. “Barbaric practice.”

All four of them huffed in agreement.

“I didn’t ask at the time,” he continued. “I was just happy to be able to save at least a few of them from the Dockyards.” He looked at Braxiatel with worry in his eye. “But now I’m going to ask you: What did you use those capsules for, and does it have anything to do with that group of children.”

“I would think the answer obvious, don’t you?” Braxiatel replied coolly. “Surely you aren’t that stupid.”

“How many?” he asked firmly, his eyes on the lines of children being led into the Zoo. “How many children, Braxiatel; and just where did they all come from?”

“They’re from all over Gallifrey,” he answered. “Innocent people who should never have been part of the war.”

“How many?”

Romana answered the question for Braxiatel. “Close to two hundred and twenty thousand all totalled. Women, children, men. Elderly and youth.”

Narvin coughed out with disbelief. His voice was a silent breath of hope. “There are survivors.” he said with a crack in his voice. “ _Real_ survivors of the war. Not just Time Lords, but ordinary Gallifreyans. Children…?”

“At least seventy thousand children,” Romana said with a smile. “Their parents drawn from all classes, from all parts of the planet. Real survivors, Narvin. Our people.”

“And you did this?” he asked with a slow turn of his head toward her. he looked to Romana, and then to Braxiatel. “ _You_ did this? In the middle of the war, in the absolute thick of it, you were able to coordinate and establish a full refugee colony off planet?”

“A little bit less surprise in your question might be appreciated,” Braxiatel said with a shrug. “I’ve been known to pull together much more with much less.” He looked at the tail end of the group, still being ushered into the facility. “We had a wide network of people working behind the scenes to make this happen.”

“And you didn’t involve me?” Narvin said with a frown. “Didn’t bother to provide even a slight suggestion that you were doing something like this.”

“We couldn’t risk it,” Romana admitted. “Couldn’t risk what might happen to you if you were caught aiding this …” she blew out a breath. “This resistance.”

“I see,” he breathed out. “So it is true then, the existence of the resistance against Rassilon.” He sniffed deeply. “Not that I would honestly expect yours to be the only one – or, rather, would be if more of our people survived the war.” His voice fell even quieter. “Gallifrey’s been decimated. There’s no one and nothing left.”

“Yes, there are,” Braxiatel offered. “There certainly are.”

“Then they must be protected,” Narvin said on a firm voice. “Rassilon can’t find out about them. Not yet. Not now.” He exhaled. “And he certainly can never know they were here. On Earth. He’ll destroy all of them.”

“Can you help?” Romana asked him. “In any way at all? Do you have anyone you can trust on Gallifrey…”

He shook his head. “I barely trust myself, let alone anyone else,” he admitted. He lodged his tongue in the crease at the side of his lip as he thought it over. “I certainly wouldn’t trust anyone affiliated with the CIA. Although, I might be able to reach out to a couple of people who…” He smiled. “Both of whom specialise in _protection_. They’ve been hiding out in the ruins of the Academy since the end of the war and would no doubt appreciate the opportunity to assist.” He exhaled a long breath. “And it would make my day a lot easier to know I don’t have to hold that woman back from trying to slaughter any one of the council members on an hourly basis.”

Romana’s face lengthened. “You mean, they survived?”

“It’s not all that much more than _surviving_ , Romana,” he answered. “But yes. Yes, they did.” 

“Is there any way I can see her?” she asked with a quiet and almost heartbroken voice. “Any way at all to get message to her. She must believe us dead.”

He nodded slowly. “Yes. She does. And truthfully, until I got the message from Braxiatel, I thought the same thing myself.” His eyes flicked toward the smirking Braxiatel. “Which was rather disappointing to discover – if I’m being honest. But you really do have a bit of a problem staying dead, don’t you, Brax?”

“Hardly a problem.”

Gallifreyan song filtered in once more from the group of children, many of whom were still waiting in line to get inside. Narvin looked toward the sound, an expression of wonder on his face. “Children,” he breathed out. “I might not like them too much on an ordinary day – noisy, messy, filthy things they can be – but right now. I couldn’t want to be in their presence any more.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	12. Coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narvin tries coffee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it for me for the week....
> 
> Not much to say here except: Method in my madness, remember. 
> 
> I am still getting a feel for Narvin, so bear with. I am one of the very few peeps that absolutely love love loves him... and while I ship he and Leela with an impressive amount of gusto ... I respect that she is very truly Andred's woman.
> 
> I really hope that you enjoy this chapter... and will look forward to what's coming next.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Two silent, and somewhat mentally exhausted Time Lords stood with their backs against a chain link fence. Their eyes watched the cobble-bricked, outdoor, picnic area with a level of stunned fascination toward an army of young Time Children that filled each and every table and bench, and the tender care of adults who handed out carefully prepared cardboard packages filled with sandwiches, fruit, and drink boxes.

For the most part, the children were well behaved and seated as directed. Their hunger afforded the adults at least a moment without complete chaos, but there were the inevitable over-excited youngsters that jumped and cheered and playfully wrestled with each other.

“While I may have experienced a moment of unexpected emotion toward the presence of our planet’s precious children that provided me a need to remain in their company,” Narvin managed out dryly. “I’ve found my will to rescind that expressed desire over the past several spans.”

“They are quite exhausting, aren’t they?” Braxiatel agreed with a light smile on his face. 

Narvin shifted his eyes toward his fellow Time Lord. There was the smallest of rises in his brow to see the smile on Braxiatel’s face. “Yet this pleases you?”

“Of course it does,” he huffed out. He gestured toward the noisy grouping. “The future of Gallifrey, future Time Lords and Ladies. Already experiencing what the universe has to offer.”

“A trip to an Earth zoo,” Narvin said flatly. “Yes. I can see just how that will the determining factor in whether or not these youngsters will submit themselves to centuries at the Academy. Smothering any and all of their emotions and excitement to become Lords and Ladies of Time.” He exhaled and shook his head. “Only to end up chained to the planet via a council position or chancellery guard appointment.”

“It could be a worse future,” he muttered in reply.

“How so?”

“They could be appointed to Coordinator of the CIA.” 

“Yes, quite amusing,” he drolled. His brows shot up high and he took a step backward as a youngster wearing a pair of grey trousers walked toward them. There was a look of annoyance and urgency in the youngster’s face as he undid the fly of his trousers in readiness for relieving himself. 

“Oh!” Narvin remarked with horror. “Tell me he isn’t…?”

A frazzled looking woman, her hair falling from what was once a tightly held braid, and her shirt an array of splattered colours that weren’t part of the original design, jogged up quickly. She took the youngster’s hand in hers. “Master Erren, you will do up your trousers immediately! This is not appropriate behaviour. There are bathroom facilities that you will use.” 

“But the line is too long,” Erren whined. “And I need to go, _now_.”

“You will come with me and show respect, young Master,” she growled with a tug at his hand. “We are guests here, and you will behave as such. Am I understood?”

Erren slouched. “Fine,” he sang out with pained defeat. “But if I don’t get in there soon, I will soil. I won’t be held accountable if that happens.”

“You can hold it for at least a few more microspans, Master Erren.” She looked to Braxiatel and Narvin with an expression of atonement. “Apologies, my Lords.”

Braxiatel gave her a polite wave-off. Narvin merely shook his head. “That one will end up a Cardinal, I’m sure of it.”

“How did you come to that conclusion?”

“Already passing off his accountability to someone else. Can’t be more than, _what_? Seven orbital cycles of age?” His eyes drifted back to the group, and to where Romana was happily handing out more food packages to a long table of children. He let out a sound of curiosity.

“What’s on your mind, Narvin?”

“The Lady President,” he answered cautiously. “I believe there’s something wrong with her face.”

Braxiatel narrowed his gaze to look toward her. As far as he was concerned, she looked absolutely lovely. “I don’t understand. She looks perfectly fine to me. Nothing wrong at all.”

“No,” he said with a much more scrutinous expression on his face. He shifted his chin forward and focused his gaze a little tighter. “She’s smiling,” he said after a moment. “ _Smiling_. I didn’t know she was capable of that.”

Braxiatel snorted out a sound of amusement, but he didn’t say anything.

“What security measures do you have in place for all of them?” Narvin asked after a moment, all amusement gone from his voice. “And not just from intervention from discovery by Rassilon, but discovery from other planets who would look to use them to their advantage?” He half growled his exhale. “Including the species on this planet. It’s concerning to think of what trouble can come from the people of this planet knowing there exists enough alien lifeforms to be considered an invasion.”

“They’ve been on planet for longer than an Earth year,” Braxiatel answered. “Protected by perception fields of the six capsules. I’m quite confident they will remain effectively cloaked for another year or more if necessary.”

“Do you have a back up plan in the event that one or more of those capsules fail?”

“Get them off planet,” he answered. “Despite the capsules being older, decommissioned models, they have been meticulously maintained, and can dematerialise within a microspan if necessary.”

“To where?”

Braxiatel pursed his lips outward. “I have a location that can be utilised if necessary. And no, I won’t tell you where.”

The both of them jerked backward again as a small group of children ran excitedly by them, singing out the words: “ _Tag! You’re it_!” At the rear of the group ran a pair of adults – a man and a woman – who were trying to corral them to make sure they ate their lunches.

“Ceaseless energy,” Narvin remarked. His eyes then snapped toward a shrill scream from a young girl, who had fallen whilst running. She had her scuffed knee held up in her hands, her head to the sky, and wailed out a sound of pain. “Rassilon,” he said with a wince. “That one’s got a set of vocal cords on her, hasn’t she?”

“She fell and hurt herself,” Braxiatel said with a sigh. “I would expect when you were her age, you might have done the same.” His brow lifted and his mouth turned up. “Actually. I’d expect it of you now. Think I may have actually heard it once or twice.”

Narvin rolled his eyes but didn’t counter. Instead he kept his eyes on Rose, who had run to the little girl’s aid. She quickly quietened the young child with a quick inspection of the injury, and then a quick cuddle and kiss to her forehead. One of the first aid nurses quickly took over to dab antiseptic on the wound, and Rose backed off to let the nurse handle it.

“This Lady Rose,” Narvin breathed out as he watched Rose return to the Doctor’s side. He noted the way she accepted a small offer of affection from him. It was an autonomous response more than a truly tender one. “She’s the mate of your brother?”

“She is.”

“Have they been mated very long?” his head tilted to one side. “And do they share a soul-bond, or is their mating simply physical?”

“The answer to all three is yes,” Braxiatel answered. “Mated physically, telepathically, and have been for quite some time. Within Thete’s timeline it’s a mating that has spanned centuries. For her, it’s shortly past a decade.” He heard Narvin’s doubtful hum. “Why do you ask?”

“They seem disconnected,” he answered. “He’s quite clearly besotted. That’s obvious in his tactile behaviour toward her. She, on the other hand, seems less so.” He turned to Braxiatel. “Which lends me concern, if I’m to be honest with you – particularly with her as close to your operation as she is.”

“I trust her implicitly,” Braxiatel warned on a low voice that demanded no argument. “And without any doubt at all.” He did let his eyes shift toward Rose and the Doctor, and he focused on their interactions. Although to anyone watching from outside, they were clearly in love, he could see very slight jumps of surprise in her shoulders when his brother surprised her with a touch of his hand on her arm, or an embrace from behind. None of these affections were unwanted at all, in fact she did seem to melt into it with a contented smile. But, there should be no surprise in his affections toward her. Their bond should forewarn her each time he approached. He couldn’t have snuck up on her if he tried.

“Ahh,” he breathed out on an exhale. “I think I see what you mean.”

“Is it something to spark my concern?”

Braxiatel shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he assured him. He gave her a wave when she looked up at them and beamed a wide smile in their direction. “Rose is one of the very, very, few people in this universe that I trust with every fibre of my being. I would trust her with this one last life I have.” He shifted his eyes to Narvin. “And certainly much more than I would trust you.”

“And it’s my lack of trust in you that makes me wonder if I should believe you,” he breathed out. “Trust the lives of all of these children to _you_.”

“Despite the fact that I’ve kept them safe all this time,” he grumbled. “And that Romana is so intimately involved as well. Do you honestly believe she would do anything at all to allow these people to come to harm. Distrust me all you want, but don’t lever that doubt toward Romana, nor Rose.”

“I really don’t know anymore,” Narvin admitted with a wince and heavy huff. He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and slouched just lightly. “This war. My position. My title. I’ve become so conditioned to distrust everyone and everything around me that you can’t ask my faith in anything anymore.”

“Coffee?” Rose’s voice piped up happily.

Both men looked toward her with mixed expressions. She stood before them, a paper coffee cup in each hand that she held up in offer to them.

“What is coffee?” Narvin queried with a curious lift of his chin to look into the cup. His nose turned as the milky brown contents of the cup.

“It’s a hot brewed drink prepared from roasted coffee beans,” Braxiatel answered as he took one of the cups from Rose with a tip of his head in thanks. “To some on this planet it is a life-sustaining tonic that must be taken on a daily basis – sometimes more than once a day – to remain in a pleasant and somewhat maliable state of existence.” He encouraged Narvin with a tip of his head. “Do try it, Coordinator. Who knows, perhaps it will dampen your surliness somewhat.” He looked to Rose with a wink. “Works on the humans, why not Time Lords?”

“It smells awful,” Narvin remarked when he took the cup from Rose and analysed the contents of it.

Braxiatel drew back a small sip of his coffee, licked at his lip, took in another, and then spared a wide smile toward Rose. “Oh, my darling woman,” he purred long. “You sweet, wonderful, magnificent creature. You do know me well, don’t you?”

Rose held up a stainless-steel flask and waved it a little from her fingers. “I certainly do.” She looked at the flask. “Not quite the vintage you’re used to, of course, but it’s the very best that the Southern Mountaineers have managed to distil.”

He exhaled a playful growl as he snapped an arm around her back and pulled him in toward his chest. “If we weren’t already mated to other people, Rose, I would beg a proposal of you, myself.”

Narvin let out a long huff and rolled his eyes at the delighted laughter from Brax’s apparent prey. “Oh, really, Braxiatel. Must you _really_ behave this way in the presence of _both_ of your mates?”

Rose playfully struggled for release, but Braxiatel only tightened the hold of his arm across her back. The amusement in his eyes gave way to a more serious expression when he caught sight of something flickering within her eyes. Using the crook of his finger on the hand that still held the coffee cup, he lifted her chin to look into her eyes.

“Brax?” she managed out with rising discomfort as her hands lifted to press against his chest. “What’re you doing?”

“Look at me,” he commanded firmly.

“Excuse me?” she barked out indignantly. “What are you _ordering_ me to do?”

He kept hold of her back and pointed to his eyes with his coffee cup. “I said look at me, Rose. Up here, into my eyes.”

“Why?” she stood her ground. She stopped trying to extricate herself from his hold. She lifted angry eyes to his. “So you can hypnotise me or something?”

“While that is something I am very, _very_ , good at, darling. No. I don’t intend on doing anything of the sort.” His gaze narrowed as he stared deeply into her eyes. He didn’t quite like what he saw in there and let out an annoyed huff. “Amongst other things that concern me, Rose. I can’t help but notice that you’re shielding yourself from Thete.”

His arm dropped and Rose stepped backward. She quickly hooked her hair over her ear and looked away from him, feeling slightly ill at ease from his scrutiny. “Yeah. It’s … ehm … habit.”

“Then break the habit,” he advised her firmly. “Drop your shields and let him in.”

“And since when do you get to tell me what to do?” she argued with a slightly angered tic in her eye. “My head, my choice.”

“ _His_ bond,” Braxiatel reminded her. 

“If it’s in my head,” she corrected him on a low growl. “Then it’s _my_ bond.”

“No,” he corrected with as firm a voice as she was using with him. “ _Your_ bond is inside _his_ mind – which I expect is wide open to you, even though you appear to be ignoring it. His is inside of yours – And you’re blocking him from it.” He shook his head. “That’s a very unpleasant thing for you to do, Rose.”

“As much as I am loathe to admit it,” Narvin came in with a wave of his now half-empty coffee cup. “I have to agree with Braxiatel. Shielding a bond can be such a painful experience to the shielded party that it is quite often used as a punishment…”

“And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Narvin?” Braxiatel muttered with a slide of his eyes toward him. “One of your more unpleasant CIA methods of interrogation, perhaps?”

“I won’t deny its use in the past,” he supplied coolly. “And for that matter, neither can you. As I said to your … to _the Doctor_ earlier today: Do take care of the disdain you express when accusing me of crimes you’ve also committed.” He looked to Rose with wide eyes as he pointed to his cup. “Got any more of this stuff?”

“Am I really hurting him?” she asked with a fast look toward where the Doctor was engaged in a game of hide and seek tag with several other children. “He’s never said…”

“He won’t,” Braxiatel offered. “But I assure you that he’ll wonder why. And come to think of it, I’m wondering the same thing myself. I can’t imagine the pair of you engaging in the physical act of mating without an open bond between you.”

Narvin looked horrified by that comment. “And I’d much rather not have to imagine anything at all to do with the phrase: _physical act of mating_. Abhorrent, savage behaviour.” He looked again to Rose and held up his cup. “Again, if you don’t mind me asking. Is there any more of this beverage available?”

Rose plucked the cup from his hand. “I’ll get you some more, no problems, Coordinator Narvin.”

“Narvin’s fine,” he assured her a little too quickly. “Just Narvin. And thank you.”

Braxiatel wasn’t completely finished this part of the conversation. “Rose. I’m still talking.”

“And I’m not listening,” she sang. “Whether or not your brother and I have engaged in any form of physical intimacy without a full bond connection is really none of your business.”

“Nor mine,” Narvin added. “Ehm. About the drink?”

“Yeah,” she said with a nod to him. “Sorry, Narvin. Yes. I’ll go get you another, absolutely.” She walked a few steps away and then turned back to Braxiatel and stalked a couple of steps toward him. “And anyway. Who do you think you are asking me something like that? Me and the Doctor. We like to be a little more private about that kind’ve thing, you know. Which means, it’s none of your business.”

“Hardly private about it,” he argued with a laugh. “The pair of you are like your rabbits here on Earth. Rutting away any chance you can possibly get … any _where_ you can possibly get it done. Should I remind you about the time that the two of you got caught in the panop—"

“Don’t you bring that up,” she ground out sharply. She held up a finger. “That was _one_ time.”

Narvin made a slight sound of urgency. With a huff Rose plucked the almost full cup of coffee from Braxiatel and handed it over. “There, drink that.”

Braxiatel’s voice softened. “What’s holding you back, Rose? You’ve waited years for his return with that singular heart of yours in pieces. He’s finally home now, and quite clearly ready to pick up where the both of you left off, yet you’re denying him full connection to you.”

Narvin made a sound of pleasure at their side as he drank from Braxiatel’s cup. He wasn’t in any way listening to the conversation between family members. Well, at least he was really trying not to. “This beverage is beyond anything I’ve ever tried before. And the humming in my muscles, the lift of my spirits. I must learn the recipe and replicate it on Gallifrey.”

“I’ll give you some beans before you leave,” Rose offered distractedly. Her eyes were still on Braxiatel, but rather than anger, they held fear and sadness within them. “I really don’t want to talk about it, Brax. At least not right now.” She snored out a laugh through her nose. “And as a Time Lord, I reckon you’d know all about not talkin’ about things, yeah?”

“I see,” he breathed out with a nod of his head. “He’s shielding by not talking, so you’re shielding him from your mind. Petty, I must say, this version of tit-for-tat. And so unlike you, Rose.”

Her lips pursed outward and her head dipped just slightly. She then exhaled and looked up at him with big eyes and insecurity in her shoulders. “Am I good enough for him? she asked finally. “I mean being just a Human and all.”

“Not quite sure where this has come from,” he queried with quiet surprise. “But yes. Yes, of course you are. More than you think you are, obviously.” He tipped his head to one side with curiosity. “You’ve always been secure in your relationship with him, Rose. Why are you questioning it now? What has he done, and to what level of reprimand are you going to allow me to rise to and use on him for doing it?”

That did make her smile a little. “With him, not too high.” Her brows lifted and she gave him a small smile. “But for the three Gallifreyan reporters who filmed me taking a shower, the sky’s the limit.”

At her side, Narvin spat out an entire mouthful of coffee before he had a chance to aspirate it inside a shocked gasp. Braxiatel growled low and very dangerously. “I’m sorry,” he breathed out. “What did you just say?”

“I said exactly what you thought I said,” she answered him. She lifted her head and let an expression of annoyance wash past her face. “Well, it was an accident, of course. They didn’t mean to. And I really think the poor lads were as utterly mortified by it as I was.” She sighed. “I guess it’s my fault for not locking the door, but I was distracted, what, with the Doctor asking me to bring home his ex-girlfriend from the academy … who is absolutely gorgeous and still has all of her bits and bobs still in their full upright and locked positions.” She covered at her chest with a fold of her arms. 

Even Narvin held a perplexed expression on that. “I’m not quite sure I know which part of what you said is worse.”

Braxiatel looked off to one side as he considered just who his brother could possibly have considered an ex-girlfriend. To the best of his knowledge, Thete only had one girlfriend, and that was a millennia ago. He shifted his eyes to Rose. “Are you talking about Phenneatryithdelphirassilonmas of the House of Rassilon?”

“Yeah,” she answered with a shrug. “Guess you remember her, then?”

Narvin quietly let out a long and horrified breath that came out as a moan. “Oh. Now I know which part of that is worse.”

He looked at Narvin, then back to Rose. “Hard not to, really.” His eyes shifted to Narvin with concern for a moment.. Something in Narvin’s suddenly stiff posture wasn’t sitting at all well with him. He swallowed back that worry and shifted his eyes back to Rose. “I haven’t heard that name in almost nine hundred years, Rose. Not that I particularly care to, mind. But I am curious as to how, in all of time and space, Thete managed to bump into her?”

“And more importantly,” Narvin added urgently. “You said that you brought her home? As in: to your house, where all of these refugees are?”

She looked between them. “Ehm. One question at a time, yeah?” She looked to Braxiatel. “We landed on Eotune a little over a week ago. Found a scientific post that was working for the CIA..”

“Yes, yes,” Narvin interrupted quickly. “I’m familiar with that post and what work they’re doing.”

“Destroying the local ecosystem,” she charged him. “Killing all the life on that planet.”

“I didn’t think there was any,” he answered with surprise. “It was my understanding that Eotune was completely uninhabited with no chance of ecological rehabilitation or regeneration. Such were the reports we received back from the post at any rate.”

“Yeah, well, they lied,” she advised him angrily. “Because there was life there, and it was beautiful. But she and her other scientists. They were killin’ them. The Doctor said their research into rehabilitating Gallifrey was causing the evolution of Eotune to move too quickly, and that nothing was going to survive it.”

“I see,” he breathed out carefully. “Research into the rehabilitation of Gallifrey. Of course. Yes. How could I have forgotten that?”

Braxiatel shot him a look but said nothing. There was a noticeable grind in his jaw, however.

“Well, the Doctor shut them down,” Rose said firmly, a lift in her chin issuing challenge for him to argue. “She – Phennea – was the lead scientist at that facility. She told us there was another 28 planets with the same research going on. He’s going to shut down all of them – just so you know.”

“Yes. I imagine the Doctor _would_ do something like that.” His hands slipped into his trouser pockets and fisted into tight balls at his thighs. “Before he embarks on any such mission, might I ask you to have him talk to me about it, first?” he drew in a breath. “Perhaps the two of us can arrange a mutual understanding to prevent anything – _untoward_ – happening.”

“Sounds a bit like a threat,” she remarked with a pinch of suspicion in her eye.

“Quite the opposite,” he assured her. “You have my vow that I don’t intend on threating your mate at all. Especially not with his … with Braxiatel within earshot.”

There was a call of her name from the group. Rose turned quickly to the sound of Romana’s voice calling for her to join them. She gave her a nod and looked back to Braxiatel. “Looks like the lunch break is over, and I need to take up my post as den-mother to 150 of your planet’s youngsters.” She tipped her head toward the group. “Are you two coming along for the second half?”

“To continue to hear my brother prattle on excitedly about the animal life on this planet like a Gallifreyan version of Steve Irwin?” he snorted. “Why would I want to miss that?”

Narvin frowned. “Who is Steve Irwin?”

“A remarkable fellow, actually,” he said with a shrug. “Human. I’ll have some holodisks sent your way.”

“Sound positively delightful.”

“Yeah,” Rose drawled with a look between them. She thumbed behind her. “I should go, then.” She handed Braxiatel the Stainless Steel flask. “Guess you guys will catch up.” 

“Us _guys_ will, indeed,” Narvin answered with a forced half smile. “Although I am expected back on Gallifrey shortly, so if I don’t happen to see you again between now and when I have to leave.” He picked up her hand and pressed a kiss on her knuckles. “It’s been a pleasure and I look forward to meeting you again.”

She gave him a beaming grin. “Oh? We’ll see you again?”

“Count on it,” he vowed as he lifted his head. He didn’t immediately release her hand; in fact he stroked his thumb across her knuckles. “Now. Best you be off, then. I can feel your mate’s territorialism from here. Do assure him that although I do find you quite lovely, I’m really no threat to him.”

She looked down at her hand. “Not quite sure how it is on Gallifrey, but on Earth, when you hold a girl’s hand like that, it shows a bit of interest.”

He released her hand immediately and wiped his hands on the black fabric hung over the front of his tunic. “My apology.”

“Right,” she called with a smile and a tuck of her hand behind her ear. “Meet you at the exhibits.”

Both men forced on fake smiles that didn’t suit either of them and watched as she jogged down the hill to join the group. Their smiles fell with equal speed, as did their turn to face each other.

“Phenneatryithdelphirassilonmas is one of yours?”

Narvin shook his head slowly. “She was. A very long time ago. Part of my elite group of interventionalists.”

“Not a scientist, then?”

“No,” he said slowly. “Although she can talk the talk of a member of the scientific community well enough that it can be an adequate cover, she hasn’t actually done any real research in centuries.”

Braxiatel let out a breath of concern. “She’s no longer part of the CIA?”

“Not since Rassilon was resurrected,” he answered. “She’s one of his, _remember_. One of the last few remaining survivors of the House of Rassilon. The only _pure_ bloodline in his mind.” He exhaled. “When he discovered who she was to the CIA, and how brilliant she was in covert ops … how little empathy she has for any sentient creature in the universe. Well. He gave her a very special role in council. A very secretive role known only to three of us. Rassilon, Phenneatryithdelphirassilonmas, and myself – and I only know about it because. Well. Because I’m me, and knowing things is what I do.”

“What’s that?” Braxiatel asked worriedly, although he had a feeling he knew exactly what Narvin was going to say. “What is she, Narvin?”

“She’s Rassilon’s Lady Burner,” he answered.

Braxiatel exhaled hard enough that he leaned forward to expel his breath. “And edict has been issued?”

“Obviously,” Narvin answered with a grunt. “If the CIA are under orders to kill the two of you on sight, then I think it’s pretty safe to assume that there’s been a burn edict put out on you as well.” He winced and shook his head. “I’ll made some inquires, see what I can confirm. See just what her orders are.”

“There’s not much wriggle room with a burn edict,” Braxiatel said with a huff. “Trust me, I know much more than I care to know about them.” 

“Then you also know that no Lord or Lady survives a burn edict.”

“Yes, I am aware of that, thank you” he snapped in reply. 

“But _you_ have,” Narvin remarked with a pinch in his eye. “In that alternate Gallifrey. When the Doctor was Lord Burner. You survived that one.”

“Technically I didn’t,” he corrected him. “Thete, on that world, killed me and took great pleasure in doing so – if I recall his taunting about it correctly. His assassination attempt upon me, _this_ me, was just a game of him trying to tie up loose ends, not a true edict.”

“Still,” he muttered. “A Temporal Assassin on the mark? You’re lucky to have survived at all.”

“Indeed. Very lucky,” he said with a drawn in breath. “But be assured that Thete and I, we’ve survived one of these before. We will do it again. I’ll make sure of it.” 

“You shouldn’t return to the house,” he warned. He pulled his communicator from his pocket. “Let me call for reinforcements … of the renegade kind … and we’ll perform a sweep of the residence first.”

“You won’t be going without me,” Braxiatel warned. “There are more than two hundred thousand people in that home. There because of me. I’m not letting you or your agents loose in there to scare them any more than they already are.”

Narvin snorted. “Do you think I intend on calling one of _my_ agents for this? They’ve all been ordered to kill you, Braxiatel. I’m not a complete idiot.” He tapped his fingertip on the face of the communicator and held it to his ear.”

“Then who…?”

“Andred,” Narvin said into the communicator. “It’s Narvin. I need to speak with Leela. It’s of an urgent matter if you don’t mind.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	13. Speeding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leela and Andred arrive on Earth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ran out of time, again....
> 
> Ended where it did because we were at risk of this going on forever, and I needed to find an end to the chapter.
> 
> For those of you who may think that the Doctor isn't acting anywhere near where he should be at this juncture... there's a quiet storm brewing beneath the surface, don't worry about that.

~~oooOOOooo~~

A rather common description that people offered of the Doctor in his current incarnation was that he was like an excitable little puppy. The holder of limitless energy and excitement. A man who could run, run again, run some more, and not even break a sweat. He could chase an army of aliens with a smile on his face and a glimmer of glee inside his eye as he remarked on the beauty of the world around him and the brilliant advancement of the local species … naughty though they were for what they were doing with such advancements.

So that all said: One day spent with a tribe of Gallifreyan children, and he found that his apparently limitless energy did, in fact, have a limit to it. One look at the way his completely exhausted daughter was draped like a ragdoll over Rose’s chest, asleep and drooling through an open mouth on to her shoulder, and the Doctor found himself wanting to end up in exactly the same position – against Rose’s chest and all.

He wasn’t the only one to be suffering from fatigue. Each member of the party, even the sugar-loaded youngsters, were at the far end of their energy cycles. There would be a great number of quiet, sleeping children this evening, that was for sure. If they were even halfway as exhausted as he was, they’d all probably sleep for a good three days or so. 

Curiously, Rose didn’t seem anywhere near as exhausted as the rest of them were. Rose’s eyes were still bright, her stride still energetic, her smile still absolutely captivating and contagious. She carried the dead-weight of their daughter with such practiced ease that he would never have assumed that she’d been carrying the child for the past half hour. More impressive was the fact that she held Alirra with only one arm, leaving the other arm free to keep hold of the tiny hand of another Gallifreyan youngster. The little girl held her arm around the neck of her brand-new giraffe stuffie that was almost as large as she was and looked up to Rose with tiredness in her eyes as she spoke in slurred tones about wanting to be a zoo-keeper when she grew up.

How this precious woman wasn’t as completely shattered and physically exhausted as the rest of them he had no idea. She looked as though she could return home, collect another tribe of children, and go off on another outing almost immediately.

“Rose?” he asked tiredly when she juggled Alirra on her hip with a quiet grunt. “She looks heavy. Do you want me to take her?”

“Oh, I’m okay,” she assured him with a smile. “She was slipping, that’s all. I’m used to sleepy snuggles.” She gave him a quick look up and down and chuckled. “You look like you could do with me picking you up and carrying you into the bus like I am her.”

“You have no idea,” he answered with a smile. “The Lord Doctor, Time’s Champion, the Oncoming Storm, defeated by children. How utterly embarrassing to admit.”

“Well in your defense, there are two hundred and fifty of them.”

“I’ve handled bigger armies and expelled much less energy on them,” he countered with a shrug.

Braxiatel’s amused voice piped up from behind where the two of them stood and waited for their group to board the waiting bus. “Would you like a blankie, a glass of milk and to take a nap, Thete?”

“Coming from the one who chose to remain on the periphery of the outing rather than participate,” the Doctor groused. He then offered a facetious smile. “But as long as you’re offering, Brax, then yes. I’d like all of the above very much, thank you. If you could warm the milk, add a little honey and sprinkle in a little bit of nutmeg, that’d be appreciated.”

“We both know that I have no interest in providing you with any such thing,” he answered gruffly. “You have legs and heartsbeats, you are capable of making it yourself.”

Rose turned to her brother in law with a smile stretched across her face. “Thank you for making sure each of the children could have a souvenir from their day.” She looked to the windows of the bus, and the wave of stuffies and figurines through the glass. “I didn’t think we’d be able to give them that.”

“A pleasure,” he said with a light tip of his head. He looked into the sleeping face of his niece with an affectionate smile and stroked her head. “Shattered her completely, didn’t we? Such a cute little flubble, even when she _is_ snoring and drooling on your shoulder.”

Alirra’s eyes blinked sleepily and she looked up at him with the lightest of pinches in her brow. “No unicorns, Tonza-Brax,” she slurred with a shift of her head to bury her face into her mother’s neck. “Unicorns bad.”

“Ahh,” he breathed out with amusement and a lift of his eyes to Rose. “Still dreaming about them, then?”

“The only female child on any planet who doesn’t like them,” she said with a laugh. “And yeah, they’ve been the focus of her dreams for quite some time now.”

He hummed with a purse of his lips. “Interesting.” He then tipped his head at Rose, his eyes narrowed in analysis. “And you?” he asked carefully. “How are you feeling?”

“Good,” she said brightly. “Today was a success. Looking forward to the next field trip, actually.”

“I see,” he said as he took a step closer to her. With a light pinch of his thumb and finger on her chin, he levered her gaze up to his and looked curiously into her eyes. “Not tired?”

“No,” she said with a laugh and a swat of his hand. “Well, I might be looking forward to getting off my feet for a bit, but not completely out for the count.”

Braxiatel clicked in a pop of air through his teeth and nodded as he slowly let his hand fall back to his side. “Still,” he advised her with a light smile. “I would highly recommend you giving yourself a few moments of rest when you return home. I notice that Carein wasn’t present for this trip. Please have her look after things this evening.” He pursed his lips and shook his head when he saw her fit to argue. “Not that I expect you to ask, of course. Stubborn woman that you are. I will see to it myself when I get home.”

The Doctor levered a look up toward his brother. Braxiatel’s slowly spoken words and the firmness in his tone did spark slight concern. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes of course,” Braxiatel answered with a quickly brightening smile. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because it usually isn’t?” he answered with a shrug.

“Indeed.” He set his hand on the Doctor’s shoulder and looked toward Rose. “Would you be put out at all if I have Thete accompany me home this evening? There are a few things I’d like to discuss with him if you don’t mind.”

“Oh no. Not at all.” she said with her brows high with surprise. She scanned the carpark for the ruby-red monster in wonder if he’d driven here this morning. She spied it in the carpark and looked back at him with a smile. “Just, please, bring him home in one piece. Just got him back, after all.” She stroked the Doctor’s face with the backs of her fingers. “I’d like him to keep this face for a little while longer.”

He gave her a smirk, and there was a lift in his shoulders that indicated he’d made a silent guffaw. “Are you suggesting that my driving is a little less that completely safe?”

“You drive like a maniac,” she accused him with a shake of her head. “All lead foot speeding, slalom swerving with you.” She looked to the Doctor with a smile. “There’s what I call the _holy shit handle_ at the very edge of the windscreen, near the door. Learn its location pretty quick. You’ll need it.”

“My hearts hurt to know you think so little of my driving.”

She gave him a smile, rolled up onto her toes and pressed her lips to his cheek. “I love you, Brax. You know that.” She winked. “Your driving, however … not so much love as utter terror.” She then turned to the Doctor and curled her hand around the back of his neck. “Come home safe, Doctor,” she breathed out before claiming his mouth in a fierce, soul searing kiss that had him swaying in place. She released him with a pop and took a step back. She smiled at his sway toward her. “Love you.”

“My hearts,” he said with reverence and a press of his hand in between them. “They’re yours.”

Both men stood in silence and even politely waved in a manner quite out of character for the both of them when Rose stepped onto the bus and the door closed behind her. They remained quiet even as each of the busses roared to life and in a convoy departed the zoo.

The Doctor quickly turned toward Braxiatel with an expression of furious concern on his face. “Out with it,” he demanded hotly.

“Out with what, brother?” Braxiatel teased with a smile.

“You know what with,” the Doctor charged him. “Something’s going on, and I’d really prefer to have a heads up on what it is before it falls down over our heads.” He looked around them as though in search of someone, but quickly gave up on the search. “I’ve sensed something off for a couple of days and Coordinator Narvin’s sudden appearance didn’t ease my concern any.”

“Narvin was here at my request,” he replied calmly. “Not for any reasons to do with your family or anything particularly nefarious.” His shoulder shrugged. “Well. Excluding my own plans, of course. Which doesn’t affect anyone other than myself…” He drew in a breath and quietened his voice a little. “And Rassilon.”

The Doctor exhaled himself at that admission. He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and looked off to one side, toward the red lights at the back of a departing school bus. “Anything that affect you, Brax, also affects me, Romana, Rose, and the kids. Don’t you think for a moment that it doesn’t.”

“I’m flattered to know you care,” he breathed out with a huff. He drew in a deep breath and straightened his back out. “But. The wheels are already in motion, Thete. To pull the anchor now would be dangerous. I have no choice but to continue.”

“Then let me help you,” he offered. “Don’t do this alone.”

“I work better alone,” he declined with a shake in his head. “The less people I have to worry about, the better. Your sense of morality simply won’t allow you to be everything I’ll need to get through this.”

“I’m sure we can achieve what you need to without having to stoop to the level of…”

“I’m a Time Lord,” Braxiatel corrected him sharply. “Stooping to sub-levels is what we are best at.”

“You’re not a Time Lord anymore,” the Doctor reminded him cruelly. 

“Thank you for the reminder,” Braxiatel said with a curl in his lip. “But I was a Time Lord, raised by a Time Lord, studied with Time Lords, fought with Time Lords, and at one point even led them. Despite Rassilon’s edict that I am no longer Time Lord, nor can I regenerate like one, I am very much still a Lord of Time, and always will be.” He blew out a breath. The anger in his voice fled toward grave darkness “And speaking of edicts…”

The grave tone his brother used pulled hard at the Doctor’s attention. He slowly shifted his head to look toward him. “What about it? Does Rassilon have a new one to pronounce to the universe?”

Braxiatel’s expression fell, and his voice took on a particularly grave tone. “Not one he wants to make public, Thete.”

“I really don’t like the sound of that.”

“No,” Braxiatel said with a deep inhale. “And you shouldn’t, because this one. This.” He visibly shuddered. “It’s one that you need to take seriously. No jokes. No flippancy. No arrogance.”

“Again, not quite liking where this is heading.” He looked to the last of the busses leaving the grounds. “Are they in danger?”

“That all depends,” he answered with a look of his own toward the bus. It wasn’t the one that transported his own wife, but there was longing in his eyes as though it was. He looked back to his brother. “On just what the Burner’s edict parameters are.”

The Doctor’s eyes blew wide and he let out a cough of surprise and horror. “I’m sorry, what did you just say? A burn edict?”

“There’s obviously no fault in your hearing,” he answered with a sniff.

“This is not a time to play, Brax,” the Doctor growled. “Who is the edict for? Who is Rassilon looking to erase from the timeline?”

“I would think it quite obvious,” Braxiatel answered as he held up a hand. “But can my explanation wait just a second. I’m waiting for someone who can help, and I’d really prefer to have to explain this once.”

“Waiting for whom?” the Doctor asked with a look around. “Narvin?”

“Oh please,” Braxiatel answered with a laugh. “Narvin is good for intelligence, but he’s not exactly one for getting his hands dirty. That task is most usually reassigned to the rest of us.” His smile fell. “And besides, I wouldn’t let him get involved in resolving this. Tell him – or anyone – I said this, and I will end you: But Narvin is a good Lord. He has become … a _friend_. I’d much rather his hands were kept as clean as possible. If only to keep him safe.”

“A _friend_?” the Doctor barked incredulously. “You actually have people you not only consider friends, but consider you one as well?”

“I have a _wife_ ,” he said with a flick of his eyes toward his brother. “It’s not out of the realm of possibility, then, that I also have a friend or two.” He looked toward his left as a whirring sound of an impending dimensional rift wafted across the grasses. “Ahh. Here we go.”

The Doctor looked toward the source of the sound, and to a small spinning grey disk in the air that stretched and expanded to a size capable of allowing a person to walk through it. His eyes lit up and a smile stretched across his face to see a familiar figure clad in a short animal skin ensemble walk from her reality and into theirs.

“Leela,” he breathed out with surprise and awe in his voice. His eyes then traced toward a man who walked through behind her. He was dressed in typical Gallifreyan attire of a pair of trousers tucked into calf-high boots, a black, long sleeved shirt with a tunic-style sleeveless cowl that extended down his back and chest to underneath his belt to fall to his knees. His chosen colours were black and red and he struck a very striking figure of protection behind a woman who needed no protection at all.

Leela cast her gaze toward the Doctor, and she shared a friendly flicker of recognition in her eyes for him. But rather than immediately greet him, she turned her attention and a smile toward the other man. “Braxiatel,” she breathed with genuine happiness to see him. “It is so good to see you again.”

Braxiatel’s brows lifted and he shielded a light smile. “Is it really? Most people feel the opposite way about my presence.”

“Oh,” she sang with a smile. “That is because they don’t know you as I do.”

The Doctor let out a small laugh. “Actually, it’s more that they know _exactly_ who he is.” He took a step forward. “Hello, Leela. It’s been a while.”

“Hello Doctor,” she greeted with a smile. She looked around him. “Your companion, Martha, is she with you?”

“Oh,” he rubbed at the back of his head. “Martha left my side a little more than a year ago. Left to pursue her medical degree.” He said proudly. “Married now. To a Cerulean I believe. Happy. She’s very happy.”

“I see,” Leela said with a smile. “But are you? Happy?”

A smile stretched wide and he nodded. “I am. I’m back with my family, and I couldn’t be happier.” 

“There is a glimmer in your eyes that tells me otherwise,” she said with a tilt to her head. “Is the reason that Narvin sent for us the reason for that?” She looked to Braxiatel. “Which I would expect. Narvin said that you have a, oh what is it? A tempa-“ She thought about it. “I mean a temp-or-al assassin. Like the Doctor, on that alternate Gallifrey.”

Both the Doctor and Andred reacted to that admission with wide eyes. It was the Doctor, however, who chose to voice the question in both of their minds. “Did you say an _alternate_ Gallifrey? And that I was an assassin?” he looked to his brother. “I didn’t know there were alternate Gallifreys.”

“Oh yes,” Leela said with a smile. “Many, many Gallifreys. Not all of them were nice places to visit. Some of them were awful places.” She looked to the Doctor with a little bit of a shrug in her shoulders. “As an assassin, Doctor, you were not very good at it. Your prey got away from you.”

“Well, I’d agree that I’d be a rubbish assassin,” he said with a shrug. 

“You can just leave that to me, then, Doctor,” she offered with a smile.

He was aghast by that suggestion. “I don’t want _you_ to be one, either, Leela.”

“But if it means that I can protect you and Braxiatel, then I am happy to be what you do not want me to be,” she said in a very indignant manner, although she did have a slight smile. 

“Which is what I understand we’ve been called here for,” Andred said to enter himself into the conversation. He gave both men a nod of his head. “Lord Braxiatel, Lord Doctor. It has been a while, and regenerations since we last saw each other.”

“Including one or two for yourself,” the Doctor said with a one-sided smile. He gestured toward his goatee, and then his hair, long, muddy dark blonde in colour, with thick beach waves that went down below his shoulderblades. “You’ve gone with a rough and rugged incarnation this time?” 

“He is quite handsome,” Leela agreed with a smile. “My lion has a strong mane and body, does he not?”

“Not the only thing that’s strong,” Braxiatel noted with a scrutinous look up and down Andred’s new form. “I don’t think I’ve seen any Lord of Time with quite so much unnecessary bulk to him.”

Andred smiled at him. “Have to break the mould some time.”

“Yes,” he drawled out with an extension on the s.

“Enough of the talk,” Leela said after a second, and with a smile as the Doctor started to look at the condition of his arms in comparison to Andred. “Narvin told me you have refugees, and that there is an assassin inside your compound.”

The Doctor’s head shot up from his arms. His eyes were wide with horror. “Oh no.”

Braxiatel held up his hand to beg a moment from his brother. He kept that hand held up to the Doctor and looked toward Leela. “How much has Narvin told you, and did he give you any new information from the capitol to pass along to me?”

She shook her head. “No new information, but he has told me that he will be in touch if anything new does arise. All he has said is that Rassilon gave a, oh, what was it? A kill order?”

“Burn Edict,” Braxiatel offered.

“Yes, that is right,” she breathed with a nod. “An order for execution of you and the Doctor.” Her eyes flicked to the Doctor at his gasp. “Do not worry, Doctor. I will not allow this to happen. We know who is the assassin, and I promise you that I will introduce this woman to the sharpest point of my blades and end her life before she can think to end yours.”

The Doctor exhaled worriedly. There was a slight tic in his eye when he looked toward his brother. “ Brax. How long have you known about this? How long have I, and my family, been in danger of this?”

“Come with me,” Braxiatel said with a turn toward the carpark. “Best we discuss on the way back to the house.” He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and pointed it toward a red SUV at the end of the carpark. It revved to life with a growl and a flash of lights, and he put the keys back in his pocket as he began to walk over the curb and onto the tarmac. “Come on.” 

“I asked you a question,” the Doctor said with urgency. “How long, Brax? How long have you known about this?”

“About four hours,” he answered without looking at him. He could see the Doctor’s fury to his right, and Leela’s curiosity to his left. Even further to his left Andred stalked an almost lazy gait. “And if it wasn’t for Rose, we might never have worked it out.”

“Ahhh, Rose,” Andred said with a wide smile. “How is she?”

“As always, she is a never-ending cause of my unrelenting concern,” Braxiatel admitted cryptically. “But she’s well. I am quite sure she will be thrilled to see you both.”

They reached the purring vehicle, which unlocked automatically when Braxiatel put his hand on the door handle. He looked to his brother, who looked across the roof at him with fury in his eyes. “Oh settle down, Thete,” he warned him. “From what we can ascertain, Rose and the children aren’t in any danger. If I thought that for a moment, I’d have them out of there within a heartsbeat.”

“Then what does she have to do with it?” he queried hotly as he opened the door and climbed inside.

Braxiatel waited until everyone was in the vehicle. With a grit in his teeth he stepped on the brake and re-started the engine with the press of a button. He held his wrists on the steering wheel a moment and looked over the dashboard to the carpark outside as the seat shifted to its pre-set driving position. With a light huff he sat back in the seat and leaned a forearm along the window edge.

“When I spoke with Narvin this morning, he advised me that Rassilon had issued orders to all CIA agents that if any of them were to encounter Thete or myself, that we were to be executed on sight.” He looked into the rearview mirror to look at Leela’s angered expression. “This was an order set by Rassilon almost immediately after my brother saved the planet and ended the war.”

“Which surprises me for two reasons,” Andred offered. “One, because the Doctor saved Gallifrey and ended the war, and so why would Rassilon want to order his execution. Two, because I can’t think of a single person on Gallifrey that would even consider assassinating him – for that very specific reason.” He glanced into the mirror to look at Braxiatel. “You, on the other hand. Yes. I can see a line up of people willing to follow that particular order.”

“Ouch,” Braxiatel answered facetiously.

“If I didn’t think I’d be neutered by my wife, I’d probably do it and see if I could claim a reward for it.”

“This is not a time for you to jest, husband,” Leela warned him with a firm voice and a smile lightly gracing her lips. She looked back up to the mirror. “But I do find myself agreeing with him. Why would anyone want to kill the Doctor.”

“As your husband was so keen to point out, Leela,” Braxiatel said with a grunt. “For as many people who wish to see me exhausted of regenerations and finally put in the ground, there are just as many looking for Thete’s head on a platter as well.”

“Our last encounter with Rassilon didn’t go in his favour,” the Doctor added. “He was brought to his knees and humiliated. It doesn’t really matter what amount of good either of us do in the past, present, nor future, he _will_ seek vengeance for that defeat.” He blew out a breath. “Quite honestly, I expected something to come at some point. Wasn’t quite expecting a burn edict, of course. That does seem a little on the side of extreme if you ask me.”

“It’s not your first,” Braxiatel said with a sigh. “Nor mine, come to think of it.”

Three sets of eyes looked toward him. The Doctor was the one to speak. “How do you mean, not the first? No one survives a burn edict, Brax. No one.”

“It would be a wise thing for anyone issuing a burn to fully understand just who it is they’re trying to erase from the timeline,” he breathed out. “And the power that individual might have over any and all circumstances surrounding it.” He looked at the shift stick at his side and dropped his hand. With a squeeze of the button with this thumb, he threw it into drive, then stepped hard on the accelerator. With a roar of the engine and the whizz of the twin turbos, Braxiatel tore out of the carpark.

The Doctor let out a yelp at the sudden G-Force of acceleration that shoved him back into his seat. “By the will of Omega,” he yelped out. “Rose wasn’t kidding when she said you drove like a maniac.”

“Her _holy-shit_ bar is there,” he reminded him with a flick of his eyes toward the handle near the door. “Feel free to hang on if it will stop you from soiling yourself.” His eyes lifted to the mirror. Leela whooped with excitement in the back, Andred was more fascinated that excited or fearful, this being his first time in an Earth ground vehicle. 

“This is absolutely fascinating,” Andred said with a smile. “Fully enclosed like a skimmer, but it remains on the ground instead of along a cushion of air.” His smile fell with a shudder as the vehicle jumped and shuddered over rough roads. “Which leads toward a rather bumpy ride, doesn’t it?”

“It can,” Braxiatel offered. “But let’s get back on topic, shall we?”

“You’re expecting me to concentrate when you’re driving me into death, Brax?” the Doctor ground out. “The speed limit along here is 30 miles per hour, just so you know.”

“I’m aware of that, thanks.”

“Then why are you moving double that?”

“It gets me where I want to get to faster,” he answered with a swerve around a vehicle ahead of him. 

“And just where might that be, then?” He growled. “This isn’t a Time Machine, so hitting 88 isn’t going to shoot us backward or forward in time.”

“So tell me about this assassin,” Leela asked with a turn in her seat to better address the side of Braxiatel’s head. “And who is she?”

“Her name is Phenneatryithdelphirassilonmas,” he answered with a light look toward his brother, noting the way his face completely drained of colour. “As I expect that to be a mouthful for you to remember, Leela, let’s call her Phennea. According to Narvin, she is a former CIA member, one of his tip elite covert interventionalists.”

“I have heard of her,” Andred remarked. “When I was undercover in the CIA as...”

“Torvald,” Leela said with a snarl. “Weasel creature that he was.” She looked to her husband. “And you still seek forgiveness for that, which I will not grant you, Husband, despite our union now.”

“Understood,” he breathed with a nod. He looked up to the mirror to address the two men in front. “What I do recall is that she was regarded as being incredibly beautiful in any incarnation. Described as a siren who wasn’t above using her wiles and hypnotic prowess to snare her _prey_.”

“A hypnotist?” Leela asked. “She relies on the use of wizardry to perform her deeds?”

“Interesting,’ Braxiatel muttered. “What else, Andred?”

“Oh not too much,” he said with a shrug. “Just that she’s a bit of an overachiever who was more about gathering intelligence than moving for immediate takedown. If she saw something she thought she could score additional points for from Narvin or from council, then she would delay and make excuses until she’d gotten what she was after.”

“Which might explain why she hasn’t gone after you yet, Thete,” Braxiatel breathed out. “She’s likely casing the compound to gather as much as she can to feed back to Rassilon.” He let out a breath and hit the steering wheel hard with the butt of his hand. He yelled out a series of syllables that had both the Doctor and Andred wince with its severity. “We have to move them all. The whole lot of them. There’s no telling if she’s gotten word back to Gallifrey or not; or what amount of time we have on our hands.”

“It’s unlikely she’s been able to reach Gallifrey,” the Doctor offered with a voice spoken over a dried throat. “There are communication issues between Earth and Gallifrey right now. The dimensional walls are providing difficulties in communications. It’s proven to be one of our stumbling blocks in determining our next steps against Rassilon.”

“Yet I’ve had little problem reaching Narvin,” Braxiatel muttered. 

“Coordinator of the CIA,” the Doctor offered. “Off planet as much as he’s on it. Likely you caught him on a field trip.”

“I hope you’re right,” Braxiatel muttered. “I really hope you’re right.”

“I brought her in, Brax,” he admitted shakily. His elbow was on the door, and his hand covered his mouth. “I talked Rose into letting her come with us…”

“You weren’t to know,” Brax assured him. “I didn’t even know. It was only because Rose happened to mention her name that Narvin caught on at all. If she didn’t bring her up, I’d be as clueless as you are right now, and there’d no way we could set up a counter-attack like this.” He stepped harder on the accelerator and shot by another car. The swerve of the vehicle threw them all off to one side, but by now none of them were particularly terrified of Braxiatel’s driving. They were more concerned about what waited for them at home.

“You and everyone at that compound will be protected,” Leela offered. “I promise you that, Brax. This Phennea will have to get by me to get to the both of you, and I will happily slice her along her belly and wave her entrails as a warning to others that they should not take up where she left off.”

“Delightful image,” Braxiatel muttered.

“She threatens members of my pack, Braxiatel.”

“Actually, it’s Rassilon setting out the orders,” the Doctor offered with a shrug. 

“Then when I have finished with Phennea, I shall return to Gallifrey and do the same to Rassilon.”

“Perhaps,” the Doctor breathed out. “If we could find a way to get Phen on our side. Appeal to the Gallifreyan in her.”

“Leela?” Braxiatel crooned. “I need both hands on the wheel, but if you would mind, can you please punch my brother?”

“With pleasure,” she answered ass he balled her fist and struck the Doctor hard enough on the shoulder that he let out a yelp. “Do not be a fool, Doctor. A woman who uses trickery in this manner is not to be trusted. And _you_ can be far too trusting.”

“Oi!” he barked out. “I was only considering options. I didn’t say that it was a bonafide plan of attack.”

“Attack,” Leela said with a smile. “Now you are talking, Doctor.”

He rubbed at his jaw. His bottom lip jutting out just a little. “Brax,” he managed out. “Are you still in contact with Narvin?”

“I am.”

“Then,” he said with a light dimple in his cheek. “Perhaps this is something we can use to our…” He stopped talking and looked into the mirror just outside his window as bright red and blue lights flashed behind them. “What’s that?”

Braxiatel huffed and took his foot from the accelerator, flopping back in his seat with a slouch as the car began to slow. “Not again.”

“Not what again?” Leela asked. “Is there danger?”

“Oh,” he said with a sigh as he flicked on the indicator and merged to one side of the road, bringing them to a slow stop. “Only to my wallet, really.”

“What’s going on?” Leela asked in a worried voice.

“Police,” he answered. “We’re being pulled over.” At his side, he could see his brother now fully sideways in his seat looking toward him with his arms folded across his chest and a smug expression on his face. “Oh don’t even.” He held out his hand. “Psychic paper, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Why should I give you that?”

“Because I don’t exactly have a driver’s license on this planet,” he answered. “And there’s a high chance that if I get caught driving – again – without one, that I’m going to end up arrested and thrown into an Earth gaol.” His nose scrunched up. “And I’d much rather not, thank you.”

“Oh? Really?” the Doctor said with a smug expression. “Then this will be a very interesting encounter, won’t it? Irving Braxiatel, Lord Cardinal of the high council, arrested and imprisoned on Sol III for the crime of driving like a maniac without a license.”

“Thete, please?” Braxiatel growled. “This isn’t the time.”

There was a knock on the window. Braxiatel hovered his finger on he button to lower the window. “All of you, say nothing. Especially you, Leela. Let me deal with this, okay.” His eyes flicked to his brother. “Which would be much easier to deal with if you would just give me the psychic paper.”

He wound down the window and offered the female officer his most disarming smile. “Well good evening, Officer…”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	14. Knicked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three Time Lords and one huntress of the Sevateem inside one Ford Explorer that's been pulled over by the police...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not much to say here ... except that lots of stuff happens ...
> 
> Juggling so many different personalities at once is a bit of a challenge... hope I managed it okay.
> 
> I really do hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

_Braxiatel wound down the window and offered the female officer his most disarming smile. “Well good evening, Officer…”_

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” she queried him around a bright flashlight that she shone in through the open window.

Braxiatel held up his hand to shield against the light and looked to her with narrowed eyes unused to such brightness. “Oh, I suspect it might have to do with driving a little over the limit.”

“A little?” she queried with a slight smile that was much less amused than it initially appeared. “I clocked you at 80, Sir. The speed along this road is only 30 miles per hour.”

She shone the flashlight across the seat toward where the Doctor sat in a sideways slouch and held it on him for a moment before shifting the beam of light toward the back, to Leela, and then Andred. There was a lift in her brow and then a pinch as they came together with a sense of indecision. Her light then shifted back toward Braxiatel. “License and registration if you don’t mind.”

“It’s not that I don’t mind,” Braxiatel offered with a charming smile and a purr in his voice. “But we are in a rather unfortunate situation where I don’t quite have either of them on me right now.”

“You are supposed to carry both of them on you at all times when operating a vehicle.”

He nodded. “Indeed. And ordinarily I do, however, I did receive a rather urgent request from my friends here for pickup after they were stranded after their own vehicle broke down.” He exhaled a breath with feigned regret. “And in my hurry to offer immediate assistance, I forgot to grab my wallet. I am sure you’ll understand.”

“I’m quite sure that I don’t,” she offered flatly. “What’s your name?”

“Smith,” he answered with a smile and a smooth tone of voice. “John Smith.” He held back on thumping the thigh of the Doctor when he quietly groaned. “A common name, I know. But I can assure you that I’m no common man.”

“No,” she breathed out, her light once again shifting to the Doctor. “I expect that you aren’t.” Pulling back her flashlight, and slipping it into a holster on her hip, she let out a light breath. “Wait here a moment while I run your plates.”

“Yes,” he drawled. “You do that. I’ll wait right here for you. Do be quick, I have the stove on at home.”

She walked back toward her own vehicle, a small sedan with the yellow and blue checkered markings of a London police vehicle. His eyes were locked on the mirror as she walked, and he let out a long and low sound.

The officer that had pulled them over seemed legitimate enough with a quick and cursory view. She wore the neon yellow vest with reflective striping that was typical for a London police officer working into the quickly darkening evening. Her hat, with its checkerboard band and royal emblem at its centre was in-line with what he expected – had it not been for a CIVR instead of the EIIR more appropriate for the current era.

The evidence of a Gallifreyan staser in a holster at her hip only added to Braxiatel’s very sudden wave of dread.

“Brax,” Andred muttered from behind him. “Her weapon…”

“I saw it,” he mumbled under his breath.

“So did I,” the Doctor said with a growl. He pulled his sonic screwdriver from his coat pocket, and then slouched low in the seat to dig his hand into the side pocket of the same garment. “Were you able to tell the issuing party?”

His eyes didn’t leave the mirror. “Black, not red. CIA, definitely,” he answered dryly. He noted how the officer pulled a communicator from her pocket rather than use the mic that was attached to her vest. “The ones used by the CIA are larger than the ones used by the Chancellery Guard … and a lot more lethal. This one has a regeneration inhibitor on it when using the lethal setting.”

“Great,” he answered with a frustrated breath as he finally located a small electronics screwdriver and set his sonic on his lap to make a few adjustments. “Andred. You’re used to the CIA weaponry. Any idea on the frequency of the staser.”

“It’s been a while, Doctor, but if they’re still using the same technology they did during the war…”

“Unlikely,” Braxiatel muttered.

“I don’t think they’ve gotten around to a redesign,” the Doctor offered with a shrug as he continued to make adjustments to his sonic. “Economy is shot on Gallifrey, I can’t see them putting money into research for new weapons tech.” He looked back to Andred. “So?”

“Wavelength 445 nanometre, Power around 500 megawatts,” he answered. “Or thereabouts.”

“I can work with that, thanks.”

Braxiatel flicked a look toward his brother. “I can’t help but notice that you’re using a screwdriver to adjust your screwdriver,” he noted. “Just what are you doing?”

“Hoping to be able to neutralise the staser charge,” he said with a shrug as he looked up from his sonic and pocketed the small screwdriver with a light lean to one side. “If Andred’s correct about the wavelength frequency of the staser, then a quick hit with the sonic should render the weapon completely harmless … or at the very least neutralise the regeneration inhibiter.”

“Which doesn’t entirely help Leela or myself, does it,” he said with a long sigh of defeat as he rubbed at his brows. 

Leela looked at his worry with a fierce glare. “I do not need help,” she assured him. “I have seen these weapons, and I have still defeated those who use them. This woman, this Time Lady of the CIA, I will not allow her to cause you harm, Braxiatel.”

He nodded and focused back on the mirror toward the officer, who still spoke on her communicator in front of her own vehicle. He could quite easily put his car in gear and tear off fast enough to be able to evade her completely. That thought had crossed his mind, and no doubt had crossed the minds of at least one of his passengers, but he couldn’t right now. No. He needed to know just how a CIA agent had found them. How, of all of the cars in a city of almost nine-million people, she had managed to so accurately find them. They should be the needle in a proverbial haystack. His vehicle was standard stock, and one of the most popular vehicles on the planet. Nothing outwardly obvious that it was a Time Lord that drove it, and not a human.

“I don’t like this,” he muttered through his hand. 

“I don’t think you’re supposed to,” the Doctor huffed. 

“Why didn’t she just execute the order from Rassilon?” Braxiatel asked himself. “Both of us, together, in a vehicle. An easy shot to take.”

Andred let out a sigh behind him. “The orders are for the two of you,” he offered. “Not for Leela and myself. She’s in a grey area for the orders and needs confirmation before she can proceed. Killing you with witnesses…” he shook his head. “Orders or no, it won’t be done with witnesses. Neutralising a witness requires very specific permissions from the Agency.”

“She would have to contact Narvin,” Braxiatel said with hope rising in his voice. “He won’t give permission.”

“Not necessarily,” Andred corrected with a quiet voice. “There are several leaders she needs to reach out to before she can hope to reach Narvin directly. It all depends on what their interpretations of the order are.” He sniffed. “Narvin won’t be contacted until the orders have been executed.”

“Not what I wanted to hear,” he breathed in reply. His eyes remained on the mirror and at the woman who spoke on her communicator and held her hand over the holster of her staser. “I need to find out just how much they know about our location. How we were discovered, and whether or not they’ve located out refugee compound.”

“And your mates,” Leela said darkly. “Romana and Rose, as well as the children. This I can not tolerate, Braxiatel.”

“Neither can I,” he breathed in reply.

“Then I shall see what this lady of the CIA knows,” she offered. “I will make her talk.”

“How do you propose to do that?” Braxiatel asked flatly.

The Doctor smirked. He had more than a fair idea of what Leela intended on doing. He also intended on giving her a hand to do what it was she needed to do. “Take flank, Leela?” he asked her with a look toward the back seat. Inside the rear of the vehicle, darkened more than the front with tinted windows, she looked a dangerous figure within the shadows. “I can offer you distraction if you like.”

“You think that I am not capable of stealth, Doctor?”

“Oh, I know you are,” he said with a smile. The smile then darkened. He opted for wording that she’d use in hope it would make her more open to his assistance. “Your pack are my pack, Leela, and she’s a threat to them.”

“Your mind howls with the winds of a storm, Doctor,” she said with a dark smile. “I can hear it. I will not take away your right to defend your mate.” She snatched a knife from her boot. “but I will help you defend her.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” he said with a smile. The smile fell. “But we want answers, so you will take her alive. No killing.”

“She harms so much as a hair on your head, Doctor, and I will not be held back.”

Braxiatel looked between them. There was clear concern on his face. “What are you both planning?”

“Don’t you worry about it,” the Doctor assured him on a quiet voice. He quietly pulled on the handle of the door to open it. “Leave it to us.”

Andred held his hand on Leela’s wrist when she turned to climb out of the vehicle. “Do be careful,” he said quietly. “My Savage.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” she answered him with a smile. She opened the door of the vehicle and slipped silently into the darkness at its side. Her eyes were on the Doctor, who gestured toward the shadows with a flick of his head. He then moved quickly around the front of the vehicle, being much less stealthy than she was.

“Do excuse me,” he said with a bright smile as he stepped around the front of the car and walked down the length of it toward the officer. One hand he held inside his jacket pocket, his fingers curled around his sonic. His other hand hung down at his side. “But as my brother indicated, we are in a bit of a hurry.”

“You need to remain in the vehicle, Lord Doctor,” she warned him with a point of her finger. Her hand unclipped the strap of her holster. “Exiting the vehicle is considered a show of violence, and I am permitted to use lethal means if necessary.”

“Ahhh,” he drawled out with a nod of his head. His fingers tightened around the sonic in his pocket as he drew closer to her with cautious and wary steps. “Interesting that you refer to me by that name.” his eyes darkened just slightly, as did his voice. “Considering I don’t actually recall telling you my name. Well. I would have expected to, really. Being a passenger rather than the driver, and all.”

She pulled her staser from her pocket, and with a well-practiced stance that would allow her the best stability to aim the weapon, she held it with both hands toward him. “I’m under orders,” she warned him. “And I’m obliged to follow them.”

“Yeah,” he drawled long. “I heard. Rassilon wants my brother and I taken out of the timeline.” He kept a hand on his sonic and lifted the other to scratch at his sideburn. His mouth was downturned in thought, but quickly lifted to a more even line. “Thing is. Brax and I. We’re not as easy to eliminate from the timelines as his Lord President thinks we are.”

“I think your plan to evade me is going to be a lot more difficult than you think it is,” she challenged with a smirk as her grip tightened on the weapon. “And now I have authorisation to eliminate your friends as well…”

“And that’s where you’re making a big mistake,” he drawled with a look of utter distaste on his face. “Because not only are Andred and Leela are even better at evasiveness than Brax and I put together.” He held up his sonic, twisting on a toe so that he stood sideways to her. he looked down along the entire length of his arm at her. “But I really don’t like it when people threaten my friends.”

She chuckled. “The Sonic screwdriver,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve heard about that, Lord Doctor. Hardly a weapon that will hold up against a CIA-issued class four staser.”

His brows lifted with interest. “A Class four, you say? Oh, that’s _brilliant_ , thank you.” He pulled back his sonic and thumbed a small dial on it. “Just a quick change on my screwdriver, and…” He snapped his arm out straight once more. “And Allons-y, perfectly calibrated to neutralise your weapon. A quick press of the button.” His face tensed as he pressed the button to activate the sonic. It hummed and whirred, its blue lighted tip glowing brightly in the darkness. He released the button, flipped it in the air, and caught it in his hand. With a smile he pocketed the device. “And your class four staser is now just a noisy little paperweight.” He shrugged. “Which is the best condition for it, _really_. Not a big fan of guns.”

“What did you do?” she asked hotly. “You can’t have neutralised it.”

“You can try shooting me if you like,” he offered with a shrug, both hands finding their way into his pockets. “Just to confirm.” He pressed his lips together and tipped his head to one side. “Which was probably very stupid of me to suggest, come to think of it. There is a slight chance that my sonic had no effect at all.”

She grinned and her brows flicked. “At the will of Rassilon,” she vowed. With a wince in her face, she pulled the trigger of her gun. It whizzed and then popped. The light beam shot across the distance between him, striking in between his hearts. The Doctor didn’t flinch, jump, or react. He just stood against the light with his hands still deep inside his pockets and a slight angle in his head.

“I did say a _slight_ chance.”

“If you think that’s my only weapon, then you’re a fool,” she growled. “We never carry just the one.”

An arm snapped across her shoulder and chest from behind, and the point of a sharp knife dug into the soft skin of her throat.

“Yeah,” the Doctor drawled. “Neither do I.”

Wisely choosing not to struggle, especially after hearing a warning grunt from behind her, the officer issued a warning. “I’m not the only one looking for you and Braxiatel. There are others, and now we’ve confirmed your location…” she hissed in a breath when Leela growled and dug the tip of her knife in hard enough that she drew blood on her blade.

“I would be very careful about the threats you choose to make,” she warned. “I am not against sending your body back to Rassilon as a warning.”

“You think Rassilon is concerned about a pathetic savage like you?” she growled in reply. “He has entire armies at his beck and call.”

“And I welcome the challenge,” Leela said coolly against her ear. 

The Doctor took a look around at the road, and of the vehicles slowing to take a look. He couldn’t deny that it looked bad, and in no time at all there would be an entire squadron of police cars on route to their location. Cellphones, videos, and dashcams. Oh, this looked bad. Very bad. One thing he could be thankful of was that the street was dark and the three of them were well enough shadowed.

“Come on, Leela,” he said after a moment. We should go.”

“Is she coming with us?”

“Yes,” he answered shortly. “I have questions, and I need her alive to make sure they’re answered.”

“Word is out,” the woman warned him. “I’ve already notified Gallifrey. I’m tracked and traced. They will find me. You can’t hide from the CIA, Doctor.”

“No,” he breathed out with a lift in his shoulders. “I don’t expect that I can.” He looked to Leela. “Get her in the car.”

Approaching sirens in the distance made his move more urgent. With a jog, he ran around the car and leapt into the seat. Behind him, Leela shoved the agent into the car. “Find her tracer,” he ordered Andred sharply. He looked at Braxiatel. “We need to get out of here, but we can’t head back to the house until we know she’s clear of tracers.”

Flashing blue and red lights, and the shrill sound of sirens from ahead and behind them caused Braxiatel to let out a long moan. “This is not going to be easy, Thete,” he warned. 

“Since when is it?”

“Hold on tight, then,” he warned. “This might get a little scary.”

He slammed his foot on the accelerator hard enough that all four wheels of the vehicle spun a full rotation on the gravelled road before finding their teeth and launching them past the roar of the engine and whizz of turbos. Braxiatel didn’t bother to look for oncoming traffic before he gave a sharp turn of the wheel to get them from the shoulder and onto the road. 

“How scary?” Andred asked with a smirk, even as he patted down the woman in search of her tracer. He had a fair idea of where it was located and looked to his wife with eyes that asked for permission when he held the sides of the woman’s shirt with both hands.

“A little more than life and death, but less terrifying than Thete’s TARDIS piloting.”

“Concentrate,” The Doctor warned him as his hand found the holy shit bar, and he clung on for his lives.

“Thank you for that valuable input, Thete. I hadn’t thought of that,” he said with a grunt. “What would I possibly do without you stating the obvious.” His eyes widened at the sight of blue, red, yellow, and white blockade ahead of them and he let out a long swear that the Doctor echoed loudly.

“Hold on to something,” he growled as he slammed both feet on the brake pedal and spun the steering wheel. The vehicle skidded into a full spin that threw every one of them to one side of the car. When the vehicle finally stopped with a rock from one side to the other it was toward more oncoming police vehicles.

“What do we do now?” the Doctor asked worriedly. 

“We are a car full of alien beings,” Braxiatel muttered blandly. He leaned forward and pressed the button that would cut the engine. “One of which is impersonating a Human police officer – who they think is one of theirs – and who we’ve kidnapped at knifepoint.” He looked at his brother. “What else do we do except pray to Rassilon, Omega, and the Other that some miracle exists that can get us out of here.” He drew in a breath. “A Dalek attack, perhaps.”

“Found the tracer!” Andred called out with cheer as he held up the small, blinking device he’d pulled from the woman’s brassiere. 

Braxiatel leaned forward, his forehead on the steering wheel. “Being found by the CIA is probably a better option right now to what we’re actually facing here on Earth,” he admitted. He dragged his hands down his face as gun wielding police officers began to circle the car. “Romana’s going to kill me. I know she is, and I have no regenerations at all to even hope to survive it.”

“I still have contacts within UNIT,” the Doctor offered. “I can give Martha a call when they get us to the station – see what she can do to help.”

To the rear of the vehicle, the woman began to laugh almost hysterically at them. “Tell me this isn’t perfect,” she said with a measure of excitement in her voice. “The Lord Doctor, his former Lord Cardinal, and their friends incarcerated on a level five planet two hundred and fifty million light years from Gallifrey in the centre of Mutter’s spiral.” She drew in a breath. “Rassilon might prefer this over execution.”

“You’d be surprised,” Braxiatel corrected her. “While he and I still breathe, there’s always a chance for escape. Rassilon knows that.”

“We’ve certainly gotten out of worse,” the Doctor said flippantly. “Earth gaol? Easy peasy.”

“Which means it’s just as easy for the Gallifreyan forces to get in,” she challenged. “And—”

Her words cut abruptly when Leela finally levered a hard punch across her face. She shook it out with a hiss through her teeth as the woman slumped against Andred. “I really don’t like her,” she stated. “She talks far too much.”

Officers had now completely circled the car. Guns were drawn and orders were made through a megaphone for all of them to exit the vehicle. Braxiatel looked over his shoulder. “Well?” he asked them with a shrug. “Shall we?”

His hand rested on the handle that would open the door, but before he could pull against it, the whining, wheezing sound of a time capsule’s relative dimensional stabiliser howled through the air. 

“Oh, could this _really_ get any worse?” Braxiatel huffed out impatiently. 

Around them the road, the flashing red and blue lights, the police officers, all started to flicker in and out of existence. The sound of materialisation increased enough that they’d have to raise their voices to be heard, and then, abruptly stopped. The Red Ford Explorer now sat silently inside the expansive console room of a capsule.

“Well, well, well,” a familiar, masculine voice said with light humour and tease in his tone. “Look what the materialisation dragged in.”

“Oh, thank Omega,” Braxiatel huffed out. He then looked out of his window toward the smug looking man wearing a full-length white Gallifreyan tunic with black overtunic draped in two long panels that traveled from cowl to floor and seemed to change his mind on that. “Gods. Now I owe him one, don’t I?”

Four doors of the vehicle opened almost simultaneously, and all occupants climbed out. Leela still held onto the unconscious CIA agent’s collar and dragged her out with very little care. “Hello Narvin,” she called out with a warm smile. “It would seem that you arrived just in time.”

“Time Lord,” he muttered with a shrug. “It’s a specialty.” He then looked toward his unconscious agent, her shirt ripped open and a growing red bruise on her jaw. He dropped his forehead into his palm. “Oh, for the love of our founders. What have you done?”

Leela dragged her over and threw her down at Narvin’s feet. “One of yours?” she pointed down at her with a sharp snap of her finger. “She threatened the Doctor, and then would not shut up.”

“Of course.” He dragged his palm down the length of his face and nodded slowly. “Well we better hope she remains unconscious. If I get seen rescuing you all from …” His brows pinched. “From whatever it was that you had gotten yourselves into, then I would no doubt be in just as much strife as all of you are in.” He waved a hand to the group in a request for them to follow him to the console. “I best dematerialise from the scene before they send in their army to investigate.”

“How did you know to find us?” Leela asked. “At such a specific point in time?”

“The tracer,” he answered. “That young lady, Ellealnagunma of the Patrex chapter, is a decent agent. Fairly new to the role and feels the need to check and recheck all of her orders for fear of getting them wrong. After confirming your identity with her bioscanner, she contacted me to let me know that you’d been found. When she indicated her indecision toward Rassilon’s order for immediate execution because of the two of you…” he looked toward Leela and Andred. “I felt it best to _intervene_.”

“Because you and your agents are so very good at that,” the Doctor accused with a sneer. 

“As are you, Lord Doctor,” Narvin reminded him flatly. He let a smile tip up one side of his lips. “And as paradoxical as Braxiatel, I hear.” He tilted his head downward in chiding. “Particularly when it comes to your mate.”

“Narvin,” Braxiatel warned tiredly. “Don’t.”

The Doctor stalked forward, fury in his eyes. “You’ll leave my wife out of this,” he demanded. 

“I really wish I could,” he said with a sigh. “But unfortunately, your mate has managed to find herself located squarely in the sights of Rassilon.” He blew out a breath. “And he is willing to eliminate any and all barriers to get to her – which starts with the two of you.”

“What?” the Doctor barked out incredulously. “What has Rose done to warrant _that_?”

Narvin looked down toward a keyboard and typed in a series of codes. A large holoscreen appeared to his side, and with a flick of his hand toward it he took a step back. His arms folded across his chest and he looked at the display with his head lowered. “This should answer your question about that, Doctor.”

Braxiatel, the Doctor, Leela, and Andred all formed a line to watch the feed on the holoscreen. It started a black screen, with a date and file number as assigned by the Gallifreyan Transportation and Safety Board almost half a millennium prior. The Doctor felt his hearts sink when the date called up a particularly unpleasant and terrifying memory of a day in the life of his Eighth self. At his side, he heard Braxiatel swallow hard. The date was one they knew very well.

The black screen shifted into brilliant colour without grain or fault, and showed the command deck of a Dalek ship. Shackled helplessly against a column, the Doctor could see Rose, injured and heavily pregnant with their son.

“I can’t watch this,” he muttered with a shake in his head as he turned his back to the monitor. “Turn it off.”

“You know how this ends,” Narvin muttered low without switching off the feed. The voices of the Daleks, and of Rose verbally sparring with their leader were clear in the room as though it was occurring here and now and not 460 years prior. “You know what she did, what she was capable of doing to an entire ship of Daleks in less than a second.”

“I said turn it off,” he demanded over his shoulder, his eyes refusing to look at the feed. “I won’t ask again.”

“The moment Rassilon saw this…” Narvin continued. He stopped abruptly at the sound of Rose screaming out for the Doctor. His eyes were wide and fearful at the rising pitch of her scream, and then a thundering whoomph, which cut off sharply by the whirr of the Doctor’s sonic. He looked up to see the furious Time Lord looking down along his pinstriped arm and the metal length of his sonic screwdriver toward a flickering, static-filled holoscreen. “Lord Doctor! That holoscreen was just recently installed in this capsule.”

“I told you to turn it off,” he answered, clearly incensed. “You didn’t listen.” He dropped his arm and looked toward Braxiatel. “I thought you said that Romana had that footage destroyed? Brax, you promised me that no one would ever see that.”

“Thete,” he breathed out with a slow shake in his head. His eyes were still wide on the screen. His voice was quiet and pained. “I honestly believed her when she said she did. No one was supposed to see this. No one outside the three of us.” He shot Narvin a furious glare. “Where did you find this footage?”

“I didn’t,” he admitted. “At least not the initial discovery of it. Obviously, I did manage to procure a copy of it during my own investigation into this burn order from Rassilon…”

“Investigation into the burn order?” Braxiatel barked out incredulously. “You’ve had time for an investigation? Narvin, just how long has it been since you were last on Earth?”

“About four months relative time,” he admitted. “And you? We last saw each other, when?”

“About five hours ago,” he answered. “Relative to _my_ time.” 

Narvin lifted his chin and let out an open-mouthed hum. “Ahhh. Yes. Of course.” He flicked a switch on the console to eliminate the appearance of the holoscreen, but unfortunately the damage was enough that it simply spluttered while hovering in place. He let out a growl of frustration. “I really did like that addition to my capsule.”

“Where was this found?” Braxiatel asked after a moment. 

“In the Matrix,” he answered. “And buried deep. This isn’t Romana’s fault,” he assured him. “She may well have destroyed the footage, like she assured you she did, but the Matrix... It records everything inside a Time Lord’s mind. _Everything_. There is no hiding anything from the matrix and its own memories.” He looked between both men. “If it is in your minds, the both of you, then the Matrix has a copy of it.”

“And when Rassilon issued his execution orders, he likely had his people look into our Matrix files,” the Doctor breathed out worriedly. “A look inside our minds through the Matrix – even if the incident is as far from our consciousness as possible – it can be found.” He exhaled a Gallifreyan curse. “It _will_ be found.”

Leela spoke up from beside them, her voice wary. “What is it that happened to Rose?” she queried curiously. “What was that power?”

“Huon,” Braxiatel answered quietly. “Pure Huon.”

Andred gasped and shook his head. “Impossible,” he said worriedly. “All Huon energy was destroyed after the war with the Racnoss. There isn’t any source of it left in the universe – the Time Lords made sure of it.”

“What is this Huon?” Leela asked. “Is it dangerous?”

“Very,” Andred answered. “Which is why it was destroyed. Very powerful, and very dangerous. As you can see, it wiped out an entre Dalek ship. Every single one of them within a heartsbeat…” his voice faltered toward the end and he shot a look toward the Doctor and Braxiatel. “My Lords. I don’t need to tell you that Rassilon is of the ancient times. When Huon was in abundance and was weaponised by our people. He knows that energy better than any of us. If he can get his hands on a source, even a tiny amount of it…”

“Then his chances of continuing with his Ultimate Sanction can become a reality,” the Doctor said with fear and loathing. “It doesn’t matter that the war is over, and that the Daleks no longer threaten Gallifrey and the rest of the cosmos. If Rassilon is able to initiate the Ultimate Sanction, he will do it, and it means the end of the universe.”

“We can’t let that happen,” Braxiatel agreed. 

“I got it all out of her, though,” the Doctor insisted with a wince. “All of it. I was sure I got rid of all of it.” He looked to his brother. “Lord Phiroi, he confirmed that. He told me – _assured me_ – that I had cleared everything that remained from her.”

“And how many times have you believed that, Thete?” Braxiatel said quietly. “How many times have you been sure that all of it is out of her system? Once? Twice? Three times?”

He shook his head, a look of pain and desperation on his face. “I have to get to her,” he half pleaded. “Now.” He began to stalk. “I have to run tests, do analysis. I need to make sure that it’s gone.”

“It’s not,” Braxiatel confirmed quietly. He felt the sting of his brother’s glare on him. “I can see it. See it deep inside her eyes.” He inhaled deeply. “And I am beginning to think that you’ll never completely rid her of it. It’s become part of her now, and I believe that she’s producing it naturally.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the Doctor scoffed. “Huon was never a naturally occurring energy. It was a creation of our people to assist with time travel experimentation.”

“Then explain it to me,” Braxiatel argued. “Just how your mate can continue to ripple with it – how even after she tests completely negative for it – her levels rise again?”

“I don’t know,” he answered with little more than a whisper. “But I’ll find out.”

Narvin cleared his throat for their attention. “There is something else. I’m not entirely sure if you will consider this good news or bad.”

“What else?” the Doctor ground out impatiently. 

“Phennea,” he answered flatly. He looked to Braxiatel. “She’s not on a burn edict as we thought – although the order will come soon enough according to the whispers around the capitol.” He looked to the Doctor. “It would seem that she’s been sent to find you, find your mate, and perform her own scientific analysis. I would no doubt assume that she’s already managed to infiltrate the scientific minds of your compound and now holds secrets and information that the both of you combined don’t yet know.” He exhaled. “Once her analysis is complete, and she is confident that she can learn nothing else, she will eliminate those of you who stand as her protectors, and then return Rose to Gallifrey…” he winced. “Where she will be come Rassilon’s little science experiment.”

Braxiatel’s face tightened with disgust and with purpose and he shook his head. “She won’t have anything,” he assured. “I have Rose’s medical records and her scan results so tightly held that not even Thete has access to them.”

The Doctor’s eyes shot wide. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Phiroi won’t release anything to anyone,” he assured him. “I trust that Lord more than most. He and Rose are very close, and I am quite confident that he will not betray their friendship by speaking of her to a brand new and far too curious Time Lady sniffing around.” He smirked. “He is far too suspicious and wary of anyone to do that. He’d more likely offer false information just for fun.”

“Which isn’t an entirely bad idea,” the Doctor said with his brows lifted. “If we arrange to have her given false information, which she can then feed to Rassilon, then we could dissuade him...”

“Would it not be easier to just kill her?” Leela offered. “This Phennea woman.”

“Am actually with Leela,” Andred said with a tilt of his head toward his wife. “For once. False information is as risky as the truth. Best to just end the threat entirely.”

Leela held her finger up in warning to the Doctor. “And you will not tell me that it is for you to change her mind,” she growled. “This woman is a killer. She can not be trusted. I will not allow you to trust her.”

Braxiatel held up both hands to ask for quiet. “We might need to check for the appearance of the Seven Sisters of Time’s Apocalypse with me saying this: But I agree with Thete.” He leaned a hand on the console and drummed his fingers on the surface as he slouched to one side. “We can use Phennea to our advantage, make sure that what she feeds back to Gallifrey is to our advantage. In this we can direct and manipulate any and all movements we think Rassilon will make based on the information he receives.”

“You will use this woman like a puppet?” Leela asked with a gasp.

“She wants to kill me and kill my family,” Braxiatel said darkly. “I think that I’m within my rights to arrange a little manipulation and betrayal before she takes that chance, don’t you?”

“Bloodshed is quicker.”

“But so very messy,” he said with a smile. 

“I shall agree with you, Braxiatel,” she warned him. “But on one condition. If I feel that it is necessary, I will thrust my knives into both of her hearts and end her.”

“If I agree to that,” Braxiatel scoffed. “You’ll end her the moment we materialise.”

“I will not,” she assured him. “But I will watch her. I will watch her movements. I will be ready for when the moment is right.”

“Fine,” Braxiatel huffed out, knowing that arguing with Leela was moot. He looked to Narvin, a heaving inhale lifting his shoulders. “I think it’s probably time we went home.” He looked at his car parked in the middle of the console room. “Got any ideas for just how we might be able to manage to park my car outside my home before materialising inside?”


	15. Contact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose makes pie and asks a big favour of Lord Phiroi

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of those chapters that I feel really apprehensive about posting. It is a subject matter I know absolutely nothing about, and that is so far from my comfort zone that I need a passport to post it.
> 
> I;m not entirely sure if it went anywhere near where I wanted it to go, but for sure it went somewhere.
> 
> Next chapter will be much lighter.
> 
> I really really hope this comes across well and that you enjoy. Not really all that sure how I feel about it TBH, so please be kind.

~~oooOOOooo~~

For the first time in a very long time, Rose’s kitchen was alive with the delicious aroma of magnolia pie. Braxiatel and Romana had been unable to procure the fruit for at least the last seven months, citing that the magnolia orchards had been all but completely decimated in the war. She could still see the devastated look on her brother in law’s face when he spoke of it, and of the new barren landscape of his beloved planet.

When the Gallifreyan tribe had returned from their field trip and the exhausted children were shuffled through the hallway toward their residence capsules in the backyard, Rose had paused at her doorway to kick off her shoes. She caught part of a quiet discussion at the table just beyond the door about rehabilitating the lands of Gallifrey, and how it was heartsbreaking that they had to consider that most, if not all native flora on Gallifrey was to be considered extinct.

Rose’s mind immediately shifted to the mighty cliffs of Mount Lung and the magnificent towering cadonwood trees, Schlenk and Sarlain blossoms, Tristort bushes, Magenta and Magnolia orchards. She could still smell the fresh and aromatic scents that kicked up with the dry winds to circle up and across the landscape. She could still hear the tinkle of silver leaves high above her. Beauty and magnificence unrivalled by any other. 

Another memory quickly assaulted her mind’s eye with excitement and urgency, and Rose hadn’t even bothered to hang her jacket before she ran toward where the Doctor’s TARDIS stood silent against the wall. She didn’t have a key to the old girl anymore, but the ship didn’t deny her entry. The TARDIS door flew open eagerly before she made it to the door.

“Show me,” she’d begged hopefully. “Please say it’s still in here, and that all that work we did paid off.”

The TARDIS didn’t disappoint. She offered a hum of pride inside Rose’s mind and led her straight toward the magnificent cliff overlooking Mount Lung, a landscape she believed lost to the ravages of time and war.

“You wonderful, magnificent woman,” Rose purred out thankfully to the old time ship as she ran fingertips along smooth bark trees and let her bare feet pad through silky, luscious red grasses. and toward a pair of fully mature, towering magnolia trees laden with luscious, juicy fruits.

She didn’t waste time harvesting enough fruit to make at least three pies. She knew she’d have to make at least that many for her first pie-bake in several months if she intended to be able to share it amongst the Time Lord resistance council as they plotted and planned this evening. Braxiatel could eat an entire pie on his own without an ounce of remorse and she could very easily picture him curling an arm around the dish and snarling at anyone who dared come near him with a fork looking for a taste.

And so now the delicious aroma from the pies now cooling on the stove underneath protective mesh domes filled the kitchen and the home. She hoped that it might provide the Lungbarrow lads with a welcome scent of home if and when they ever actually returned to the house. They’d been gone for far too long. She and Romana had believed that the Explorer would be waiting at home long before the rickety old school busses had navigated the streets of London and arrived. They were actually disappointed to discover that this was not the case, and now – a good three hours after the sun had completely disappeared over the horizon – they still weren’t home.

Braxiatel must have had a reason to take the Doctor from the group. The chances were high that the pair of them were engaged in something they’d prefer the ladies didn’t know about. Rose tried very hard not to worry about them, in fact she swallowed down any such worry as it wormed into her throat, and busied herself with baking.

They’d be okay. Of course they would be.

Rose sighed as she leaned her elbows on the breakfast counter with a magnolia fruit core in one hand, a pairing knife in the other. There was a moistened paper towel with a scattering of black seeds on a small plate in front of her, and as she plucked a fresh pip from the core with the tip of her knife, she gently added it to the towel.

“My dear Rose,” Lord Phiroi asked with friendly curiosity from across the counter. “What _are_ you doing?”

Her eyes flicked very briefly from the tip of her knife toward the tall Time Lord to acknowledge his presence, but then fell back to task. “Magnolia seeds,” she answered. “Figured if I took them from the cores and tried planting them, we might be able to take the saplings back to Gallifrey and grow a new orchard or something.” She looked at him with a smile. “My small part in the rehabilitation of Gallifrey.”

His eyes narrowed to take a closer look. “These are Gallifreyan Magnolias?” At her nod he held his head back with surprise. “How were you able to procure Magnolia fruit.”

She pointed toward the blue box in the hallway. “From the Doctor’s TARDIS. About, um, 450 years ago in his timeline, I created a garden in his TARDIS. A little surprise for when he needed the comforts of home on his travels.” She beamed when she looked up at him. “A full recreation of the cliffs overlooking Mount Lung. They were only small saplings and seeds when I planted them, but now it’s fully mature, and is just beautiful.”

“I would love the opportunity to see it for myself,” he breathed out longingly. “Those cliffs and the majesty of the suns setting between the mountains are a memory I hold so dear.” A smile appeared on his face. “And to know that we have specimens native to Gallifrey that have survived…” he stopped speaking with a sigh.

She gave him an apologetic look. “It’s the Doctor’s ship, and we both know how territorial he can get over her.” She shrugged. “Don’t want to make him mad by letting another Time Lord step across her threshold.” She set the fruit down onto a plate and wiped her hands on a small tea towel. “I’m sure he’ll take you on a tour when he gets back, though.” 

“Perhaps,” he breathed out doubtfully. “But in the meantime, my dear. It’s time for your weekly checkup.”

Rose slouched and uttered a pathetic whine. “Do we have to? I’m in the middle of something. I don’t want to lie on a gurney while you poke and prod and make unhappy noises at me.” She poked a finger into his chest. “And then not tell me why you’re making unhappy sounds at me.”

“I make unhappy sounds at everyone,” he said with a smile. “Don’t count yourself as something special in that regard.”

“Wow. Master of charm, you are.”

“If I said that you are in my hearts,” he said with a wink. “Would that make you feel better?” 

“It might,” she breathed out with a smile. “But I’d feel better if we could forego the scans and stuff this week.”

“Sorry, dear,” he said with genuine apology as he held up a small handheld scanner and cotton-tipped swab. “Lord Cardinal’s orders. Constant monitoring until he says otherwise.”

“He’s not getting any pie, then,” she huffed as she leaned down on her forearms and stretched out her neck to put her forehead closer toward him. “He can watch all of you eat it with a side of brandy ice cream, and get _nothing_. He can pout about it all he wants to…”

“He’d have to come home first,” Phiroi muttered with humour as he took her chin in between his thumb and finger. His eyes flared with scrutiny as he looked into her eyes with a well practiced stare of analysis. 

“He’ll be here tonight,” she said quietly with her jaw held firm in Phiroi’s hand. “Or not. Depends what he and the Doctor are up to right now. Pair of mischief makers the both of them.”

“Hush, please,” he asked her gently. His mouth curved downward and he hummed a sound of displeasure in the back of his throat. “Right,” he muttered more to himself than in response to her remark as he took her gaze from hers. He looked to the side to pick up his scanner and pressed the sensor against her forehead. It beeped and chirped a quick series of sounds that deepened Phiroi’s frown as he monitored the LED display.

Rose’s eyes crossed as she attempted to look up at the device against her forehead. “You’re making unhappy sounds again.”

“I always make unhappy sounds,” he muttered. “I thought we’d already covered that.” He set the scanner on the counter and uncapped the swab. “Open up,” he ordered her gently.

She opened her mouth and let out an ahhhh sound. Her nose turned up as he dragged the tip of the swab around her teeth and cheeks. When he drew the swab back and capped it with his thumb, she ran ger tongue around the swabbed areas and turned up her nose. “All done?”

“For now,” he answered softly. He held up the swab and scanner. “I should start the analysis and log the data.” A smile crossed his face and he spoke with a light facetiousness in his tone. “Thank you, as always, for not making a single complaint.”

“Before you go,” she said quickly, her lips pursing with question. “Can I ask you something?”

He had turned away from her, but quickly turned back. He leaned his hands on the counter in a curious slouch. “Of course.”

She lifted a hand to scratch awkwardly at her hair. “Do you know about soul bonds and the repercussions of shielding them?”

A look of shock and discomfort crossed his features. “Having not formed one myself, I can’t really give you much more than a theoretical answer. However, my understanding is that it causes great discomfort to the shielded party. Why do you ask?” his expression widened toward worry to take in her guilty slouch and expression. “Oh, Rose. Don’t tell me that you’re shielding from your mate. The Lord Doctor must be suffering horribly.”

“He’s never really said,” she defended meekly. “I mean, okay, he mentioned that I was shielding, but not what it was doing to him.”

He exhaled a breath and shook his head. “He probably wouldn’t,” he said softly. “Afraid of making you feel guilt for it.” He lifted his hand to lightly pinch her chin in his hand and levered her face up to look at him. Once again, he widened his eyes to properly analyse what he saw within her eyes. “You don’t know how to drop them, do you?”

“Sometimes I think I do,” she answered softly. “And when I do, it takes so much effort to do it. I end up with a headache.”

“Come around here,” he urged her with a firm, but soft voice. “With your permission, I would like to go in a little deeper to take a look.”

“In my mind?” she questioned as she followed his direction and walked around the counter. She stood in front of him, her chin lifted to be able to accommodate looking into his face with his much taller stature than hers. “Like, go inside my head.”

“With your permission,” he assured her with a nod of his head. “I may be able to assist.”

“I don’t know if Brax would like that,” she admitted. “He’s usually the only one allowed in there. Well, him and the Doctor, of course.”

“It’s really not his decision to make,” he said with a roll in his eyes. “Your mind, your decision, Rose. However, if you are uncomfortable, then we can wait until the Cardinal returns and let him deal with it.”

“Do it,” she said quickly with quiet urgency. She grabbed his hands and lifted them to her head, placing his fingers against her temple. “I trust you.”

“I really don’t need to be touching you,” he said with a smile. “I’m more than just a touch-telepath. A request for contact is all I need.”

“This is what I’m used to with Brax and the Doctor,” she said to him, her eyes wide. “Makes me feel better, yeah?”

“Understood.” He drew in a breath and closed his eyes. “Just relax. Close your eyes. You’ll barely feel a thing.”

“Okay. I’m ready.”

“Contact,” he breathed out in request. When she echoed his request and dropped her hands to hold lightly at his wrists he drew in a deep breath and entered her mind. The first thing he noticed about the inside of her mind was that it was calm and serene. Which wouldn’t have been cause for too much concern if the calmness and serenity wasn’t as incredibly silent as it was. There weren’t the spinning whirlpools of emotion that he would normally encounter within someone’s mind. By Omega, there didn’t even seem to be even small puddles of feeling or sentiment at all.

Her mind should be alive and sizzling with emotion. There should have been storm clouds and lightning storms of passion, excitement, fear, and hurt all around him … but all of that was completely absent…

…and that wasn’t a good sign.

“Rose,” he breathed out audibly to her when he felt a light breeze of worry along the link. “Are you okay?”

“I’m always okay,” she answered with a whisper.

“No one is _always_ okay, he corrected her.

“When we have to be, we are.”

He didn’t like that admittance one bit. “I can’t find him,” he admitted gently after a moment. “Your link with your mate. Think of him for me, please. Bring the Doctor and your heartbeat for him to the front of your mind.”

She breathed out her acceptance of his request and shuddered out a breath of longing as she thought of the Doctor, of the first one she met and fell in love with, of the one who loved her so much that he made her his wife, and then of the one who was with her now, all pinstripes and manic energy. A man passionate and eager for her affections, but so very patient toward her apprehension. His name passed through her lips as she turned all of her focus toward him.

Outside of the two of them, the wayward group of four made a somewhat raucous entrance into Rose’s kitchen. Braxiatel was in the lead of the convoy, his eyes bright with thrill and anticipation as he drew in a breath filled with the aroma of Magnolia pie. “Oh, please sweet Goddess of Time, do tell me that’s what I think it is!”

Doctor was a half step behind him and drew in a deep breath of appreciation himself. While he did want to share his brother’s excitement toward the prospect of pie, he did have some rather more urgent concerns about just how enough time had passed that the pie was able to be prepared in the first place. He wanted to take look at a clock or watch to determine the span of time that had passed but found himself almost fearful to do so. His time sense did volunteer up a number, however, and he let out a moan. “Gods, we’ve been gone for three and a half hours.”

Leela and Andred walked behind them both, their arms held loosely across each other’s backs. The tightness of the hallway made smaller by the line of three travel capsules made walking wider than single file near impossible, so Andred quickly shifted to walk behind his wife, both of his arms around her waist.

“Is your home always so filled with these time ships,” Leela queried with concern. “Does this not make you feel confined?”

“Sometimes,” the Doctor offered with a sigh. “Well. I say _sometimes_ , but it’s really all the time.” He rubbed at his head. “How Rose hasn’t exploded on all of us with demands to get out and give her some room, I don’t know.” His bottom lip pursed out slightly. “I know I would’ve about five minutes after I got here.”

“I’m sure you probably did,” Braxiatel remarked with a shrug. He readied to continue with a well rehearsed insult, but stilled in place, words caught in his throat at the sight of Rose and Phiroi in the kitchen. His face fell into an immediate and obvious expression of disapproval to the scene. He stopped the approach of his brother with an arm across his chest.

The Doctor looked down at Braxiatel’s arm and then back up to his face with annoyed question. “Is there a problem?”

“There most certainly is,” he answered with a snarl. He gestured toward the pair ahead of them with a tilt of his chin. “They’re engaged in a telepathic connection,” he muttered under his breath. “Of which I certainly do not approve of. Damn you, Phiroi, what are you playing at?”

Although full of disapproval to it himself, the Doctor issued a harsh hissing hush toward his brother. “Severing that connection will hurt them both,” he warned.

“Both of you shut up,” Phiroi growled out through his teeth. “I’m almost there.” His voice softened as the cacophony behind Rose settled back into gentle silence. “That’s it, Rose. Keep him in your thoughts.”

The serenity and peace inside her mind wavered for only a moment as a rush of pure love and devotion filled the emptiness around him. The power of the emotion had the unflappable Time Lord falter in his stand and let out a long breath of awe. “By the Gods, Rose,” he breathed out. “It’s not just your heart that beats for him, is it?” He drew in a shaking breath. “Your entire soul yearns for him as well. I’ve never felt any emotion this all encompassing in all my lives.” He struggled to remain stable. “I can barely stand straight.”

“I love him,” she agreed with a whisper. A fierce passion filled her whisper, and she spoke through her teeth. “God, I _love_ him to the point it hurts.” A whimper then overtook the passion. “Too much… he could never love me like I…”

The emotions she shared shifted from intense devotion into heartache and insecurity.

Her body stabilised and her voice calmed into resignation and acceptance. “How can I expect that?”

The storm of emotions fled through Phiroi’s presence with a crack of lightning and a boom of deafening thunder. Serenity and calmness returned almost immediately, which had Phiroi spin inside her mind to chase the storm that was scarpering quickly into the distance. He made chase after the storm, desperate to know why it wasn’t being tempered and dealt with as naturally as it should be.

The answer became horrifically clear when his presence collided hard against a brilliant and swirling amber wall that extended up far beyond the limits of his mental reach. He looked up, and then down, and then pressed his mind toward the wall. It was this border that drew in and then held back every single fierce emotion that could possibly swirl inside the mind of Rose Tyler…

…At the very centre of it swirled the bright blue shimmering tornado that held her bond with her mate. The tornado cracked with hot, bright, tendrils of forked lighting that struck out at the threatening negative emotions that swam around it. Occasionally, it shifted from its place to slam against the wall that held it captive.

Phiroi flinched at the resounding sound of the tornado striking the shield, but curiosity and wonder pressed him to move closer to it. He held up a mental construct of a hand to hover across the shield’s surface. Small cracks in its surface released a heated amber steam-burst of short-lived acute emotional reactions, but those were quickly inhaled back through the wall.

It was a hissing, leaking, greedy barrier that drew energy from the most potent and perpetually regenerating part of a human mind – her emotional centre – and it was feasting on an absolute smorgasbord of high intensity emotions held in and suppressed by a mind not strong enough to wholly contain it.

He lifted his presence toward the pulsing tornado that raged on the other side of the wall and willed it for help as he held his mental hands against the shield that held it back. With a grit in the teeth of his physical self, Phiroi flared open the power of his mind to try and obliterate the block that was holding back the full bond between mates.

Phiroi barely had his mind open halfway to its full power before the wall ahead of him lit up a brilliant and opaque amber. He could no longer see the storm of emotions, not the tornado bond within, all he saw – and all he felt – was the rolling, swirling, bubbling amber wall that swelled in between them. It pulsed and shimmered and continued to swell to engulf his presence almost entirely. He fought on, opening the full power of his mind against the mental onslaught of an ancient power.

He let out a long cry in the physical realm, clutching hard enough at Rose’s temples as to leave bruises. She may have cried out as well, he couldn’t tell. But he wasn’t going to let this power defeat him.

There was a hot, blue, lightning crack of power across his mind that howled for him to get out. It shot through him and into the amber wall with a blinding flash. His breath was torn from his chest as the amber power huffed and finally expanded to hurtle his presence along the expanse of a human mind, scorching the ground behind it until finally, inside the physical realm, Lord Phiroi was forcibly thrown from Rose’s mind, through the air, and onto the dining table behind him. The Shockwave that followed him boomed loudly, shattering the glass panels of the sliding doors to the backyard residence area.

Rose swayed in place, her mind swimming. She didn’t feel the fingers of her mate as he released the hold on her temples, nor did she feel his arms come around her as she fell backward into his chest.

“Phiroi,” she panted out. “I’m sorry.”

Phiroi’s eyes were wet with emotion as he pulled himself up off the table, his stand unsteady and swayed. He looked toward the Doctor, who was on his ass on the floor and cradled Rose across his knees.

“Did it work?” he asked huskily. “Can you feel her now?”

The Doctor lifted red and sodden eyes toward him and gave a slow nod. “Yeah,” he breathed out. “I can. For now.”

“Thank you,” he said with a light bow of his head. “For your assistance.” 

“I was helping her,” he drawled out with a light tic in his eye. “Not you.”

He looked at Braxiatel and held at his stomach as he walked toward the open doors of the medical capsule. “Come with me, Lord Cardinal.” He exhaled. “I really don’t think you’re going to like what I have to tell you, so it’s best we speak in private.”

Braxiatel closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “As you wish.”

In the darkened corner of a space between capsules, a pair of focused eyes blinked with slow fascination to what she had just witnessed. Her gaze shifted toward the countertop, where a scanner and cotton swab had been so carelessly left behind. Once the room was clear, which it should be soon, she would collect those items for herself…

…She looked down at the blue-white fur of a male Gallifreyan wolf seated calmly in the shadows of another capsule in watch. This creature had been openly stalking her for since she arrived a week ago. It didn’t matter where she was, or what she was doing this ghost-like creature was there watching her every move. She didn't know why it was here, who it belonged to, or if it existed beyond only her memory, but he was there and he wasn't going to leave her alone any time soon.

Okay, she might have to find a way past him, first.

~~oooOOOooo~~


	16. Wolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The wolf stalks his prey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Accidentally posted this chapter to the wrong fic... all fixed now**
> 
> Had intended to do much more today (and did get a bulk of the next section done), but crisis happened here, and I ended up with only an hour in total to write.
> 
> So this may end up being just a little disappointing ... or a lot ... sorry about that...
> 
> So sorry about that.

~~oooOOOooo~~

When they had fallen backward on to the tiled floor in front of the breakfast counter, the Doctor hadn’t caught her quite as firmly as he felt he should have. His arms had circled her to brace her stumble, but he hadn’t been coordinated enough to prevent her from falling onto her butt on the tile. Her legs did catch across his, however, and it allowed him the ability to provide her with a little comfort and to pull her against him. He counted off each of the heaving, panted breaths she took as she tried to settle her breathing back to normal. 

He winced when she clutched at the lapel of his blazer panted out an apology to him.

“You have nothing to apologise for,” he assured her gently as he ran his cheek across the top of her head. “Nothing.” He exhaled gently. “If anything, it’s me who should apologise to you.”

She argued with lightly spoken words that he didn’t quite catch, and all he could do was exhale as defeatedly as he could against her head. And if he was being honest, defeat was the last emotion he was experiencing right now. Bliss and serenity was a more apt descriptor for the feelings rushing through him head to toe and toe to head. For the first time since he was given back his bond he could feel her in his mind – truly feel her. Her mind was finally open to him. The headaches he’d had for nearly two months had completely disappeared. For the first time in more than four hundred and fifty years, he felt whole.

“My hearts beat for you,” he said firmly against her head, his arms tightening around her. “More than you know. Don’t ever doubt that.”

“I know,” she whispered in reply. She nestled against his chest, her nose against his throat and repeated her words.

“I really don’t think you do,” he said with a sigh. “Actually, I can very confidently say that I know for a fact that you don’t.” He drew in a breath and his voice softened. “The depths of these feelings, Rose … I need you to understand that you’re my entire universe.”

She lifted her chin to look up at him, her neck pulling into her shoulders with the effort. “I love you too,” she said with a weak smile.

He strained his own neck to look down at her without shifting their position and gave a smile as he drew his thumb along her cheek bone. “That is something I have never doubted, Rose. Not for a moment.”

In a tender gesture, he pressed his lips to hers in a very gentle affection. He barely separated the two of them, keeping his nose pressed lightly to the side of hers. “I’ll make you believe in my love for you again, Rose. That’s my vow to you.” He exhaled. “Even if it means regenerating into a new incarnation so that you don’t look at me, and only see what I became after my regeneration.”

“Do _that_ ,” she said with a quietly firm tone of voice. “And I’ll _never_ forgive you.”

A thick and burly form dropped into a crouch in front of the two of them. “I’ll go with Rose on that, Lord Doctor. Regenerating is cheating. You need growth in _this_ incarnation to prove yourself to her.” He looked to Rose. “Hello, Rose. Long time no see.”

Rose let out a yelp and scrambled back harder against the Doctor’s chest. “What the…? Who…?”

“Andred,” the Doctor warned with a huff. “Do you mind? We were having a moment. A very _important_ moment.”

He lifted a hand to scratch at his thick hair in a sheepish gesture that was in complete contradiction to the tough-looking warrior exterior of him. “If I didn’t interrupt to check on the wellbeing of your mate at this precise moment, my own mate was ready to intervene in her own very delightful manner.”

Rose ducked her neck into her shoulders and looked to him with wide and shocked eyes. She poked a finger into his scraggy goatee. “Andred?”

Still inside a crouch that didn’t look entirely stable, he gave her a smile and opened his arms to her. “One of thirteen of me, yes. How do I look on this go around?”

Rose peeped out excitedly and with a light bounce on her backside. With a call of his name, she launched awkwardly forward and threw her arms around his neck in excited greeting. The two of them fell backward, him onto his butt, and her onto her knee in front of him. 

“So good to see you,” she said inside a growl of happiness. Her head shot up and she looked to his side. “Where’s Leela? And the children, are they here? Mark will be thrilled to see them.”

“They are not children anymore, Rose,” Leela said from her towering height above the two of them. “Our children have grown into strong and proud men.”

Rose scrambled up to a stand. Her eyes were wide with surprise and she petted her hand down in the air at her hip. “But they were this little only a year ago. How can they be all grown up?”

“Many years have passed since we last met,” Leela said with a flat stretch of her lips. “Has it not been so long for you?” She looked to her husband. “Andred. Has it not been centuries?”

“Awkward timelines,” he admitted with a shrug as he pulled himself up to a stand. “Due to the Cardinal’s very deliberate travel timeline between Earth and Gallifrey, it ensured that time on Gallifrey ran faster than it did here on Earth.” He looked toward the Doctor, who was still seated on the ground, his back up against the edge of the breakfast counter. “A ratio of one Gallifreyan year to three Earth days, if I am not mistaken.”

He shrugged in response. “I’m not entirely sure of the actual differential,” he admitted. “But it sounds accurate enough, I suppose.” He looked upward in thought, his lips moving as he voicelessly performed calculations in his head. A smile appeared and he lowered his head and gave it a shake. “Pi.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Pi,” he repeated with a smile and a lift of a chuckle in his shoulders. “Brax calculated it to the ratio of Pi.”

Leela looked at him with a pinch in her eye. “And what is pie?” she looked to Rose. “Is that not something you bake?” She held up her hand when both men looked ready to explain and, knowing that the explanation would span several long and quite confusing minutes and provide her with information that she wouldn’t ever actually require outside of this conversation, shook her head. “You do not need to explain.”

“Speaking of,” Rose offered with a smile and a gesture toward the breakfast counter. “Fresh batch. Would you like a slice?”

Her nose turned up. “Thank you, but no. I do not like pie.”

Braxiatel’s voice called in sharply from the medical capsule. “Good, that means more for me. Thete, if you can possibly find it within your capabilities to get up off the floor, then please join us in here if you will. You may wish to hear that Lord Phiroi has to say for yourself.”

The Doctor looked up from where he was still seated and exhaled a breath. The breath switched to a grunt as he picked himself up off the floor and stretched up to a stand. “Yeah. Be right there.” He touched his hand to the small of Rose’s back and pressed a kiss against her temple. “I won’t be long.”

“Knowing you lot,” she said with a laugh. “And the way you like to talk, I might not see you until the second coming.”

“Not quite sure what that’s supposed to mean,” he said with a sigh. “But I suspect it means a while.”

“Something like that.”

“Will you still be up?” he asked hopefully.

“If I’m not, then please just come on up,” she asked with as much hope in her voice as he had in his. “Spend the night?”

The smile he answered her with was genuine and happy. “I want nothing more.” He tipped his fingers to his head and nodded to the others. “Leela. Andred. Excuse me.”

They stood as a trio as the Doctor walked toward the medical capsule. As he stepped across its threshold, the doors hissed quietly closed behind him. Rose turned toward her visitors; her mouth stretched in a smile. “So to what do we owe the pleasure?”

“Social call,” Andred answered with a shrug and a look of warning toward his wife. He then looked back to Rose, who’s attention was focused more on the shattered granular chunks of tempered glass that were once her kitchen doors than his shared look with Leela. “We happened to find ourselves in the galaxy and thought we’d visit.”

Rose chuckled and shook her head. “If you expect me to believe that…” She drew in a breath and walked around the counter to retrieve a rubbish bag, dustpan and brush from underneath the sink. She moved in a somewhat autonomous fashion as she returned and fell into a crouch. “I’ll have to talk with Brax about how we’re going to replace this,” she muttered as she started to clean up the glass.

“Can I help?” Leela asked. She then elbowed Andred and looked toward Rose on the floor with order in her eye. 

“Ahh yes,” he said with a nod. He crouched next to Rose and put his hand on the brush. “Let me.”

“You’re my guest,” she replied almost hotly. “Thank you, but I’m fine to do this.”

He remained in a crouch at her side, his elbows on his knees for stability, and looked through the empty aluminum door frame toward the capsules in the backyard. This was his first visit to the house since before the resurrection of Rassilon. The last time he was here, the idea of an off-world compound for war refugees was little more than a suggestion made across a table during a card game with Braxiatel in between meetings of the resistance. To see his suggestion now so perfectly executed by the eldest of the Lungarrow lads, he felt great pride in himself, and in all those who made this possible.

“I can’t believe you were able to do this,” he admitted with awe. His brows pinched together. “To save so many.”

“It was a team effort,” Rose offered gently. “A team of people that your Rassilon should be _proud_ of, not want to destroy.” She looked toward the capsules, darkened and quiet per curfew regulations. “I know they’re not Time Lords like you and the lads, Andred. But these are good people. Really good people.” She smiled. “Even the sneaky Southern Mountaineers who have a remarkable ability to have a new still in operation before we’ve shut down the last one.” She laughed. “Honestly, me and Romana. We’ve given up on trying to stop them.”

That made him chuckle. Back during his Chancellery Guard years, he’d encountered the feisty communities that were scattered throughout the mountains in the southern hemisphere of Gallifrey. None of them particularly liked the men in red uniforms skulking about the mountains and were quick to defend their lands with fierce determination … which typically involved plenty of good strength stilled beverage around a green-flamed fire under the lines of the transduction barrier above them…

…And then negotiations the following day when the footage of the events of the previous evening were shown in graphic detail. He couldn’t quite recall if any arrest warrants had actually ever been successfully executed against a single member of the Southern Mountain tribes. There were one or two that he’d accidentally _lost_ back in the day.

His attention caught from Rose’s work with the soft glow of a communication or recording device between two capsules. “Leela,” he called softly.

“I see it, Husband,” she answered him.

Rose lifted her head and squinted into the darkness. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing that you need to concern yourself with,” Leela answered. Her eyes fell to the light luminescent shimmer of a wolf crouching in the darkness; it’s attention toward the glow. “I see your wolf and would like to say hello.”

“Ahhh,” Rose breathed out. “Yes. Soliarn. He’s been a little out of sorts these past few days. On alert, I suppose, since his cub started venturing away from his mother.”

“He has become a father,” Leela breezed with a smile. “Yes. That would make sense. It is best that I not to startle him, then.” She put her hand on Rose’s shoulder as she passed. “I will be careful.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Rose teased in reply.

Leela stepped through the doorway, taking a longer stride over a scattering of cubed, chunky broken glass. Her eyes focused inside the darkness, the vision of her own inner wolf sharpening each of her senses. Her fingers fell down past her hip, down as far as her knees as she walked with a cautious lean, and waggled with silent greeting toward the white wolf as she passed by him. Soliarn silently pulled from his own predatory crouch and moved to her side, his huffs and snorts a visible breath of steam.

The glow that she’d caught shifted slightly, and Leela knew that the person who held whatever device was causing the light was on the move. Walking in a lean that gave a sideways gait, she monitored the glow. Whoever it was wasn’t standing in between capsules, the glow was too broad and soft to be reflecting in between the metal capsules. This individual was standing at the rear of the entire line of them and judging by the slow shift of light from one direction to the other, they weren’t in the mode of escape. This person was walking a circle, and completely unaware of her presence.

That thought made the silent warrior smile. As she reached the back edge of the capsules, she quietly lowered herself into a crouch beside the wolf. Her hand came down lightly on the haunches of Soliarn, who dipped himself low as well.

“We wait,” she whispered to the animal. “Watch.”

The back end of the capsule line was darkened to a heavy, murky blackness. The only source of light coming from a device which illuminated the face of the woman that held it. Leela inhaled deeply and released her breath slowly through her nose as she watched.

Phennea wandered in a circle, shifting the lift and angle of her device as tough seeking out a signal. She kept her eyes on the face of it, maintaining a precise angle of light against her face no matter which way she lifted and turned it. The blue glow highlighted the more prominent features of her face, while shadowing the more shallow lines and crevices of her features. It lended a ghost-like image to her face, gaunt and ugly, sallow and aged. While Leela expected that in the light of day this woman was symmetrically attractive, in the true light of darkness, when it was spirit moreso than body on display, her ugliness was revealed.

And in the eyes of the wild savage beauty that crouched beside a wolf, the Time Lord creature in front of her was the epitome of grotesque. She reeked with the odour of death and betrayal, Leela could taste it on her tongue.

It took only two minutes, and Leela was finding comfort in not having been sensed by a fellow huntress, but Phennea suddenly stilled with her back toward her. She shifted her head to look down along her shoulder to send a gaze toward her hiding place.

“Whoever you are, reveal yourself,” she demanded in a low tone. “I don’t appreciate being watched.”

Soliarn snorted at Leela’s side and lifted from his crouch to step forward. He offered her a glance of warning and then looked back toward Phennea as he made a slow approach of her. his head was low in his shoulders, his gait predatory as he walked a wide circle around her. His deep blue eyes glistened in the darkness, the light blue markings on his coat luminescing in warning.

“What are you?” she asked the wolf darkly. “Why are you constantly in my peripheral?”

Soliarn snorted a hot breath in the cool air. His eyes remained locked on her even as he lowered and slowed his circular stalk of her. If he had the ability to smile, Leela was sure he would have had one on his long powerful jaw at the way this woman turned in place to keep her eyes on his.

“Are you even real?” she asked the wolf with a sneer in her lip. “Or are you a spirit beast that’s come to me in warning?”

It seemed a reasonable enough question. The size and stature of this beast was one of the legendary Dahrama wolves that stalked and hunted in the forests of Gallifrey. Fearsome, and with a reputation for non discriminate lethality, she couldn’t fathom why any sensible person would allow one to stalk around children. That, and no one seemed to actually register the beast’s presence amongst the refugees. This animal could weave and walk and not cause so much as a gasp from anyone it passed. It moved invisibly, and with focus far too narrowed upon one potential meal over so many other offerings.

“What do you want?” she asked it with a snarl inside her own voice.

In a show of the size and strength of his bite, Soliarn stretched open his jaw in a swooping motion that lifted his head to howl at the darkness above him. It was not a territorial cry, nor did it have the sound of an animal providing warning before an attack. This was the sound of a beast reminding her of it’s haunting reputation. He let the howl drag out and ebb off and lowered down onto his haunches in an attack posture. His eyes glowed with warning.

“I don’t fear you,” Phennea said with a shaking laugh. “I don’t believe in spirits and ghosts. What’s in my imagination cannot hurt me.”

“I can assure you that he is not a creature of your imagination,” Leela warned on a low and spiritless voice from behind her. “He is not of the spirit world.”

Phennea let out a gasp and spun in place. Her heartsrate shot up to a hard pound against her rib cage as she squinted through the darkness to try and see just who it was that had spoken. Even with better vision in the darkness than most, she was unable to make out anything other than a dark shadow against the rear of one of the capsules.

“Who are you?”

“The answer to that question will depend on who you are,” Leela answered with a smile in her voice. “I can be a friend, or I can be your enemy.”

“Don’t try to be enigmatic with me,” Phennea snapped in reply. “I’m a Time Lady, we invented the art of being enigmatical.”

“I know,” Leela said as she stepped off the capsule and approached Phennea. She was still blanketed in perfect darkness; unrecognisable and invisible. “I learned it from the best of all of you.”

“You’re born of Time as well?” she asked with confidence rising. A time Lady she could easily take on. Her hand settled on a blade holstered at her hip. “From which house.”

“I am not born of Time,” Leela answered as she walked around the woman to take position beside Soliarn. She set her hand on his head and made a show of stroking at his fur. “I am not from Gallifrey.”

“Human,” Phennea huffed dispassionately. “Another one of Thete’s little playthings?”

“The Doctor does not like the name Thete,” she answered. She looked down to Soliarn with a smile. “Which is why I think that Braxiatel uses that name.”

“Oh? You know Braxiatel?” Phennea asked with her smile visible in the darkness. “And how is the old boy, then? I haven’t seen him in quite a while.” She inhaled a deep sigh that held longing within it. “And I’d very much like the opportunity to catch up with him sometime.”

“Braxiatel is … is a friend,” Leela answered carefully. “And I am friends with his wife, the Lady President Romana.”

“Romana is not president,” Phennea corrected sharply. “The Lord President of Gallifrey is our supreme leader Lord Rassilon.” She sneered. “Romana hasn’t held office in centuries.”

“Inside the hearts of the Gallifreyan people, the president is Romana,” Leela said smoothly. “The people here. And _they_ are the people who matter, not the hot heads that run your council.”

“Of course.”

“Can I ask what you are doing here?” Leela asked with a stroke of Soliarn’s head. “In the darkness.”

“Having a cigarette,” she answered with a snort. “Or whatever other nefarious things your people do in the dark.”

“My people hunt,” Leela stated with a light tilt in her head. “We stalk our prey in the cover of night.” She took a step forward, slowly moving beyond the reach of Soliarn’s head. Her hand remained behind her as though still resting on the head of the beast. “Is that what you are doing? Stalking prey?”

Phennea huffed and made a show of rolling her eyes. She held up her device. “I was looking for a signal to Gallifrey,” she answered with a light wave of the device. 

“Why?”

“Is that any of your business?”

“It is,” she answered smoothly. “As Presidential Body Guard to Romana, I seek out and hunt any threat that may come for her.” She snapped the fingers of the hand still hand back to Soliarn in a request for him to step up to her side. He did so and stood in a hunch at her hip. “If you are a danger to Romana, then I am a danger to you.” She looked down to the wolf. “And this proud beast and his mate are the protectors of Rose and the Doctor.” She lifted her head back to her. “Braxiatel comes under the protection of us all.”

“I see,” she said with a huff in her tone. “So, this is a warning for me to behave myself or you’ll do what?”

“Kill you,” she answered simply. She looked down to the wolf. “Depending on who you may pose a danger to, will determine just who will be the hunter.”

“I’m not a danger to anyone,” Phennea said with a shift of personality and adding a sigh in her voice. “I was just looking for a newsfeed from Gallifrey. I am a long way from home and want to return as soon as possible.” Her voice shuddered out of her. “And what I saw tonight from Rose. That power. That scared me.” She looked to her with wide eyes. “Didn’t it scare you?”

“I do not scare that easily,” Leela answered.

“Do you know what it was?” she asked. “Just what was that power…”

“Return to your TARDIS,” Leela said sharply. 

“But.”

“I do not want to see you walking in the dark again, or I will believe you to be a threat.” She inhaled a hard sniff through her nose. “And so will this wolf. I am sure I do not need to speak of the legend of a Gallifreyan wolf to you.”

“You don’t,” she confirmed with a quick glance toward Soliarn, who for now seemed fairly disinterested in the woman. “I’m aware of their might …” She lowered her voice to a whisper unheard by either Leela or the wolf. “And how to kill them.”

“Please return to your TARDIS,” Leela said again.

“Very well,” she said with a sigh. With a slouch in her stride, Phennea slipped her communicator into her pocket and walked back through the gap between capsules.

Leela waited until she had disappeared from sight, and she heard the hiss of the capsule doors, and then dropped into a crouch beside Soliarn. She held his head in her hands and gave him a good and decent scratch with her nails. “You are a good protector,” she said to him, then dropped her forehead onto his snout. “A good instinct.” She looked up and down her shoulder toward the gap in the capsules where Phennea had disappeared. “I do not like her, either.” She looked back to him. “And together, we will protect our pack.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	17. Lightning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor, Brax, and Phiroi have a bit of a chat ... the Doctor spends his first night away from the TARDIS

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really don't know if this needs any warnings at all, or if I need to increase ratings.
> 
> Ehm. toward the end of this there is some of that type of subject matter that pushes my comfort zone (nookie-type-things). It's not raunchy or graphic by any means - all clothes remain on - but there is a start-middle-finish of sorts, so if you don't like that sort of thing, then don't read after the: ~oooOOOooo~~ in or around the middle of the chapter. The ending part of this chapter really is just mindless fluff that has no impact at all on the greater story, so you don't miss anything by skipping that bit.
> 
> That said... with my child interrupting me literally every five minutes to tell me the same thing he told me five minutes prior ... this might be a little jumpy in places. I apologise for that. 
> 
> Oh, and not a researcher or doctor, or even remotely clever, so please don't judge the sciency bits, please. I just made it up as I went.
> 
> I press post with an apprehensive finger. I sincerely hope you enjoy and don't experience any moments of squicky skeevy....

~~oooOOOooo~~

The Doctor’s hands were deep inside his trouser pockets as he entered the medical capsule. He was surprised to hear the doors hiss shut behind him as he crossed into the ship. Typically the doors remained open at all times, so for them to close for the first time since he’d arrived ... well, it concerned him. He managed to shield that concern behind nonchalance as he walked the distance between the doors and Phiroi’s office – a sterile stainless-steel room off to the side of the console room-turned med bay.

“You called?” he asked with a half-smirk as he stepped through the doorway and leaned against the doorframe. He didn’t remove his hands from his pockets, but he crossed his legs at the ankle in as much of a casually relaxed position as possible.

Phiroi looked up at him over the thin silver rims of the glasses that he had seated to the end of his nose. He gestured toward a chair beside where Braxiatel waited. “If you don’t mind, Lord Doctor.”

The Doctor pushed himself from the door with a roll of his shoulder and pulled out the chair with his foot hooked around one of its legs. “I feel like I’m in the professor’s office preparing for a reprimand,” he muttered with a look toward his brother. “And having you here doesn’t make it feel any less so.”

“Just be thankful it was always me in attendance and not our father,” Braxiatel remarked with a shrug. “He was done with your shit pretty early on.”

“And you were done with it shortly thereafter if I recall it correctly.” He took a seat and slouched deeply into it. His hands were still in his pockets and he extended his legs to their full length to cross at the ankles.

“I’ve never _not_ been done with it.”

The Doctor shrugged and looked toward Phiroi, who was patient in his wait for the two brothers to finish their verbal jousting. “So, Lord Phiroi. What have you called me in for?”

“About Rose,” Braxiatel answered for Phiroi. “Thete. We’ve made observations over the past year. Observations about Rose, and the lingering energies she has contained within her.”

The Doctor sat up straight in the chair, his interest definitely peaked. “What kinds of observations?”

“Ones you probably won’t like.”

The Doctor looked from his brother to Phiroi. “What are these observations?”

Phiroi looked to Braxiatel with his brows seated high on his forehead as though expecting the Lord to jump in again to answer a question posed to him directly. When Braxiatel waved a hand in a gesture for him to continue, Phiroi looked to the Doctor. “I don’t know if you recall the discussion I had with you regarding Rose’s Lindos and Artron levels back during the body you wore during the Time War…”

The Doctor shook his head. “I don’t recall any such discussion.”

“It was after the incident with Gallifrey appearing in the sky,” Phiroi continued. “After her collapse and recall to the house.”

The Doctor looked toward his brother with an angry tic in his eye. “After you had betrayed her and treated her like your own personal weapon.”

“Less disdain if you will,” Braxiatel commanded. “I will atone for my actions that night, but not with a demand from you, and not from Romana. My repercussions will come at Rose’s hand.”

The Doctor huffed and looked toward Phiroi. “Go on.”

Phiroi pushed a manila folder filled with data sheets across the table toward him. “Those are scan results from three months into my posting here until last week. I haven’t yet analysed todays data, although I don’t believe I need to any more given the latest development.”

“Which is?” the Doctor asked almost distractedly as he opened the file on his lap and looked over the papers within. He pulled his glasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on, holding a loose fist at his chin as he analysed the data.

“Her mind is teeming with huon energy,” he answered. “Its presence is such that it has become a part of her subconscious.”

“These data sheets show reading for Artron and Lindos,” the Doctor remarked, seeming to ignore Phiroi’s comment about the huon. “Saturation levels are extremely high for both.” He flipped th page to look at the back in case there was more data there. “I see nothing for huon.”

“We were treating her for her Lindos exposure with Artron,” Phiroi said with a nod. He looked toward Braxiatel. “The Cardinal and I saw evidence of Lindos fatigue very early into her work with my teams. Bullheaded that your mate is, she refused to step away from my patients.” He exhaled with a smile. “And to be candid with you, Doctor, she was very well liked by many of the soldiers that were brought here. Her bedside manner was kind and supportive, whereas the rest of my team…”

“Cold hearted and distant,” the Doctor mumbled as he continued to read the data. “Yes. Rose does have that effervescent way about her. Easy to fall in love with.” He shifted his eyes to his brother. “Able to melt even the coldest hearts.”

“That said,” Phiroi continued. “The Cardinal and I decided on a course of Artron taken on a schedule that would provide the best and safest form of suppression against oversaturation of the Lindos hormone secreted during regeneration.” 

“Which should have kept her at safe levels,” the Doctor said with a frown. “At much safer levels than what I’m seeing here. He went back over the previous pages. “But the dosage of Artron noted here should have been more than sufficient.”

“Which we couldn’t understand at the time,” he said with a nod.

Braxiatel cleared his throat. “Initially we believed that it was one of the hormones secreted from the human brain that was causing the Artron infusions to be ineffective.” He leaned across the Doctor to flick through the papers in search of a specific report. He then pointed to the page, hovering the tip of his finger over a data table at the centre of the page. “But those tests came back negative. Nothing a human mind can produce will neutralise the effects of Artron.”

“If anything,” the Doctor noted with a light frown. “They should have enhanced the effects.” He flicked through a couple of pages, his movements quick as though seeing a pattern. He placed four pages on the table, in a specific order, and then cupped his chin in his hand as he read through it.

“See something?” Braxiatel asked curiously. He leaned forward to peek over his brother’s shoulder.

“Fluctuating saturation levels,” he answered almost distractedly. “High peaks and valleys, rather than the more expected rises and falls based on her actual exposure levels for that particular period of analysis.” He pulled out another page and looked at that for a moment before lifting his eyes to a paper on the desk. He placed that page beside the other and circled the tip of his finger over the data table of one and then the other. “These two analysis periods show the same exposure levels to within one regeneration blast, yet the saturation levels are completely out of line with results produced over other dates with similar to identical regeneration exposure.”

Phiroi leaned forward, his elbows and forearms on the desk, and looked at the specific date ranges. He lifted his eyes to the Doctor and then shifted them toward Braxiatel. “The Cardinal did come up with a rather viable hypothesis for that – despite the ridiculous sounding nature of it.”

The Doctor hummed, his eyes still on the papers as he scanned and rearranged them on the table. “And what might that be?”

“The levels fluctuate in their intensity based upon her current emotional state,” Braxiatel offered.

The Doctor didn’t even look at him as his brows lifted and he let out a laugh. “Creative, I’ll give you that.” He exhaled. “Of course there has never been any scientific data to support Lindos or Artron being effected by emotional hormonal secretions. At least none produced by Time Lord and human brains.” His eyes were wide and his brows high as he exhaled. “Nor with any other species involved in the study.”

“Those studies never factored in huon intervention,” Braxiatel added. He waited until the eyes of his brother lifted over the top rims of his glasses to look at him with question. “What we know – what we’ve been taught at the academy about huon truly is very little. A form of magnetic particle energy that attracts its own even over great spans of distance. It’s known to be unstable at the best of times, dangerous at the worst.” He turned his chair to face the Doctor fully and leaned across his own thighs, pressing his elbows into his knees to put him into a more thoughtful lean. “We actually don’t know very much about it at all. Most of the data from the ancient times was deleted – or hidden – within the matrix to prevent any Lords of Time from learning enough to make them curious…”

“Curious enough to try synthesising the energy…” the Doctor agreed slowly. “Best to suggest it’s too dangerous and unstable to even try.” He rubbed at his chin. “And yet, it is an energy used by at least one species we know of to bring life and sustain those first few moments to ensure longevity.”

“I assume you refer to the Racnoss,” Phiroi ventured with a slow nod of his head. “A species that is extinct…”

“Not entirely,” the Doctor admitted cautiously. He held up his hand at a gasp from his side. “I wouldn’t worry about them, Brax. They don’t look to be able to form any battle forces any time within the next billion years. The nests that do exist I’m keeping a close eye on.”

“Good to know,” he answered gruffly with an exhale of disapproval. He then smirked. “Although, if you wouldn’t mind giving me a location for at least one of them, I’d love to send Narvin in to take a look.”

The Doctor’s face creased up into a wince of incredulous question. “Why would you want to do that?”

“He is terrified of spiders.”

The Doctor’s expression straightened out and lengthened. “Right,” he drawled with a shake in his head. “Risk an entire nest of a species just for your own fun and games?”

“Why not?”

The Doctor stared at him for a long moment and then gave his head a shake. “There are at least fourty eight thousand species of spider that have been identified on this planet alone. Go to a pet store, pick up a big ugly one to take back to Gallifrey and set it free in his office – don’t tempt a dangerous species like the Racnoss by sending a Time Lord in their direction.”

“Where is your sense of adventure?” Braxiatel teased with a smirk.

The Doctor pressed his fingertip into the paper. “Focused here right now, ta,” he answered. “And the suggestion that you might actually have something we can work with here.” 

“Indeed,” Braxiatel said with a sigh and a lift of his eyes that told everyone in the room that he intended on following his brother’s suggestion of picking up a spider at a later moment. He looked back down and gestured toward the two analysis tables that had caused confusion for his brother. “The periods spanning those two particular analysis tables are missing crucial criteria which I believe directly effects the results.”

“Which is?”

“The effect of stressor hormones released by the human brain on huon particle energy, and the effect by-proxy on the other non-human elements surging within a human body. I specifically refer to Norepinephrine and epinephrine.” He pointed to the data sheets. “The massive rise in levels directly correlates with a particularly stressful week in the life of your mate.” He pointed to a discarded set to the side of the desk. “The more reasonable and level readings correlate to moments where Rose was more relaxed and … dare I say it ... _happy_.”

The Doctor hummed but said nothing.

Phiroi gave a nod of his head. “There was merit to the Lord Cardinal’s hypothesis, but without doing an in-depth hormone analysis and testing in a controlled environment, we couldn’t exactly experiment to test that hypothesis.” He winced. “However, when I saw inside her mind this evening, and saw the energy for myself, it lended more than a little merit.” He blew out a breath. “It confirmed it.”

The Doctor lifted his eyes slowly. He looked at the doctor over the rims of his glasses. “How do you mean?”

“It means the huon energy isn’t only feeding off Rose’s emotional state,” Braxiatel offered worriedly. “But it’s likely contributing to it.” He shifted in his chair to lean back. “Since the day that you were taken from her on Gallifrey and she was exiled to Earth by the Bad Wolf entity, Rose has refused to engage in the rather extreme displays of emotion that she exhibited when the two of you resided on Gallifrey.” He rubbed at his knee with obvious displeasure. “She used to be one that would rather easily display whatever emotion was coursing through her: upset, anger, frustration, joy and pleasure. Now? She locks it all up instead. Barely a flicker of emotion before she swallows it back.”

The Doctor stilled. 

Phiroi nodded his head. “While I never did have the pleasure of knowing Rose back on Gallifrey and how she did handle her emotions back then, I do know her now on a very personal level. While there are – indeed – some moments where her façade might break and allow a moment of emotion, for the most part she seems to quickly suffocate it inside herself to move on and carry on.” He blew a breath from between pursed lips. “On the very rare occasion when it does become more than she can handle, the explosive nature of her release is…” he looked to Braxiatel with his brows high and worry in his eyes. “It’s…”

“It can become dangerous,” Braxiatel completed with a dark huff in his breath. “Which is what you witnessed that night with Koschei.”

“That happened because you pushed her into it,” the Doctor corrected. “Cruelly, I might add.”

“Because it’s only emotions to the extreme that will actually break the surface and give her relief,” he defended. “Because she is so determined to be strong in the face of everyone around her that anything less than completely debilitating will just be swallowed down and simply shrugged off.” He leaned forward. “Thete. You can’t tell me that you haven’t seen it for yourself since you’ve been back.”

“I have,” he admitted slowly as his mind went over incidences where he’d seen her swallow down her emotion. He didn’t like it when he saw it at the time, and he certainly wasn’t liking it now. “On Eotune.” He lifted his eyes to his brother. “She admitted to me that she wasn’t okay – with anything right now – but as quickly as she fell apart, she pulled herself back together again.”

Phiroi let out a long sigh. “And in training her mind to do that, Lord Doctor. In allowing this alien enzyme inside her to take control over that mental training, she’s feeding a power that’s thriving on negative emotions. I saw it for myself this evening in her mind. Her emotions barely have a moment for an outward display before it’s swallowed by the huon.”

The Doctor slowly removed his glasses and set them on the desk in front of him. His head was low and his lower lip pouted as he considered what he had learned. “So, what do we do about it?” he asked after a moment. “We can’t stop negative emotions, gentlemen. It’s a fact of life.”

Braxiatel pushed over a small pile of papers that the Doctor had set off to one side, it’s information not seeming as important as the rest. “While Norepinephrine and epinephrine releases seem to increase her saturation levels for Artron and Lindos, Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Seratonin releases do seem to have the opposite effect.” He gestured to the data. “These dates coincide with moments of extreme happiness: Mostly to do with the children. A school play with Mark, or any one of Alirra’s firsts.” He smiled. “Moments spent with the refugees or even walking the wolves.”

“And how does that help?” the Doctor asked with a sigh. “For all intents, the Lindos and Artron aren’t what you’re worried about.”

“If they are aiding in triggering the incorrect hormonal release, then yes. They very well could be.” Braxiatel offered. “Less of our enzymes in her body to produce the appropriate secretions that feed the more dangerous of the three.”

The Doctor looked over the papers and shrugged lightly. “So in other words, Brax, you’re telling me what humans have been saying for decades: A happy wife means a happy life.” 

“Pretty much,” he said with a shrug. He smirked. “So, as the humans say: get with the mating.”

“They don’t call it _that_.”

“Potayto, potahto.”

Phiroi shook his head. “I don’t know that I entirely agree, Lord Cardinal.”

“Of course, you wouldn’t,” Braxiatel said with a sigh. “Phiroi. You and I determined quite some time ago, that Rose would require systematic prescribed physical release of the energy if it isn’t to consume her. I’m certainly not going to spend the next however long trying to find ways to upset her or using the pressure of a bond guard to force that release.” He gestured toward his brother. “Not when Thete’s here now.” His hand’s gesturing shifted to indicate the Doctor’s crotch. “A damn good orgasm would do just fine for that; don’t you think?”

The Doctor rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Brax. Do you ever actually think about what you’re going to say before you actually say it?”

“Quite often, yes.”

“Really?” he asked with a tired tone of voice. “Because that rather flippant and insensitive remark leads me to believe that you really didn’t think it through all that thoroughly.” He huffed out a breath. “This is my _mate_ you’re speaking about. Have some care and respect, please.”

“I’m not wrong,” he said with a shrug in his shoulders. “We both know that mating is a biological imperative for humans for the physical and hormonal release that it provides their species. Therefore, it makes sense to me that it could be a very viable option in this case. And as it _is_ something that the both of you seem to enjoy, why would I _not_ suggest it?”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head. There were several retorts and comments swimming about in his head that he could have come back with but doing so would only drag this topic on for much longer than necessary, so he opted to look toward Phiroi instead. “I am going to assume that this is going to be more complicated than a simple roll with my wife between the sheets.”

“To be honest, that particular treatment option hadn’t quite occurred to me before now.” He cleared his throat against his fist with obvious discomfort. “But yes, it will have effect – but only against the Lindos and Arton saturation levels. The huon is a living, breathing, ravenous kind of energy inside her that thrives on any negative emotions or heartaches she experiences. That will take something … else… to counter.”

“Such as?”

“I have no idea,” he breathed out with worry. “I was hoping that you might want to review the data and perform some analysis work yourself.” He looked toward Braxiatel. “The Cardinal has mentioned more than once that you were a brilliant chemistry student back at the Academy.” His eyes shifted back to the Doctor. “You were also a doctor on Gallifrey who engaged in many research projects. If we can work this together, I am sure we can find the answer we need.”

Braxiatel sniffed. “In the meantime, we monitor the ticking time bomb that lives inside my sister. Release the pressure where we can and pray that we can cure her before Rassilon finds her and turns her into a weapon, a new power source, or both.”

“He won’t find her,” the Doctor vowed darkly. “I’ll make sure of that.”

“You haven’t started off really well with that, have you Thete,” Braxiatel accused bluntly. “Back for _how long_ , exactly, before you invited a member of the House of Rassilon to within arm’s reach of her?”

“Just don’t,” he warned.

Phiroi looked worried. “What is this about Rassilon?”

“I’ll field that one to you,” the Doctor muttered to Braxiatel as he rubbed his sweating palms on his thighs and exhaled a tired breath. “I…” he looked down at his knees, then lifted his head again. “I need to see my wife.”

“I expect that you do,” Braxiatel said on a breath that held the slightest measure of apology for his earlier remark. 

The Doctor rose to a stand and exhaled a long breath. “Thank you, Lord Phiroi,” he breathed out. “We can get started on a fresh analysis tomorrow.” He put his hand on Braxiatel’s shoulder. “Brax,” he said with a squeeze of his shoulder as he turned to walk away. “Good night.”

Braxiatel sat sideways in his seat and watched the roll in the Doctor’s shoulder as he wandered across the floor toward the door. There was a grit in his teeth and a depth in his breath when he turned back to the medical doctor. 

“What is this about Rassilon?” Phiror queried with a strength of disdain in his voice.

Braxiatel shook off the anger and frustration and put a sly smile on his face. “How would you feel about a campaign of misinformation toward out exulted Lord of Resurrection, old Rassilon himself?”

Phiroi’s smile matched Braxiatel’s almost perfectly. “What do you have in mind?”

~~oooOOOooo~~

The Doctor had held himself back from heading straight upstairs and into Rose’s bed. While there had been no promises made about whether or not the evening would consist of anything more than cuddling and sleeping, he felt it very necessary to shave, shower, brush his teeth, and change prior to climbing the stairs. The shower allowed him the extra benefit of having a quiet think underneath the water about the discussion in the medical capsule. These were not thoughts he wanted to take into the bedroom – far from it – and so allowing a quick discharge of his thoughts down the shower drain did him a universe of good.

Now instead of the residual lingering zoo-y scent of animal manure and randomly shared animal pheromones, he smelled all fresh with soap, shampoo, conditioner, and a light aftershave cologne. His cream Pyjamas with their light brown pinstripes were freshly laundered and smelled of the dryer sheets the TARDIS always had on hand – a mix of Schlenk and Cadonwood blossoms. Even he was happy to drop his nose and take a sniff of himself.

He did a very quick bedroom check on his two children which involved additional tucking in, kisses on the forehead, and an assurance to his daughter that there were no unicorns hiding under her bed. And then padded quietly toward Rose’s room.

The door was ajar, and he hesitated for the smallest of moments before he pressed his hand on the wood to let himself in. There was darkness on the other side of the door, and the quiet rhythmic breaths he heard from within, and the light musky scent of sleep, told him beyond all doubt that his wife was in a light slumber.

“Rose?” he whispered into the darkness, wanting to announce his presence before invading her room and making her believe he was one of those nefarious sorts on an invasion.

“Come in, Doctor,” she slurred sleepily as she rolled from her side to her back. “I’m ‘wake.”

He could hear the way she slapped her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and slowly let himself in to the room. His hand was light on the handle to close the latch as quietly as he could. He all but tip-toed across the floor toward the side of the bed he used to occupy back when they were a couple on Gallifrey. It didn’t quite occur to him to consider that Rose may have moved across to his side of the bed, or even that she may have opted to claim the bed in its entirely all to herself. So when he lifted the sheets and shifted onto the mattress and found himself with only a single for and a half or room, he exhaled a sound of surprise.

“Ehm. Not my side any more?”

Rose lay on her side and wriggled backward with tall the grace of an uncoordinated snake. “There are no such things as sides on my bed anymore, Doctor.”

With room now to move, he edged forward, chasing her backward movements with a similar lack of grace. “And why’s that?”

“I have two children,” she muttered. “I’m lucky some nights if I even get a spot at all. So, I take what room I can get when I’m alone.”

“Need me to leave so you can starfish or something?”

She chuckled lightly. “Just got here and already you want to leave?”

He threw an arm across her waist and then drew his hand around her waist, hip, then down along her thigh to her knee. With a light tug, he drew her knee upward to hook her ankle behind his calf. “I don’t want to go anywhere,” he assured her with a shuffle closer to her.

Rose drew her foot lightly up and down his calf. There was a sigh in her throat as she rolled her shoulder and shifted closer. A smile lifted the edges of her mouth. “Hello,” she breathed out.

“Hi,” he replied quietly with a quick dip of his eyes to her lips. The pink tip of his tongue ran along his lip, but he felt very little hesitation in leaning down to press his lips lightly against hers.

He had expected her to hesitate in some way. It wouldn’t have surprised him in the slightest if she had taken a small bit of affection from him and then pull away with a sigh and wish him good night. He did not expect that she would snatch his bottom lip in between hers with a long slurp and suck and then use the hook of her foot to pull at his leg in urging for him to roll toward her.

He may not have expected it, but he was not going to argue with it.

He rolled partially over her and took the entirety of her mouth within his. A growl formed in the back of his throat at the hot taste of her against his tongue and he pulled back just a breath to look down into her face as he grabbed at her thigh to pull her up more firmly against him.

Over the sound of his breath, that had deepened with lust far more quickly than he would ever admit to, he heard her gasp and sigh a sound so divine, that he promised himself he’d make her gasp out that sound again. He gave a slow rut of his hips against her, watching her expression contort and change to his movements with a slack jaw and sharply focused eyes. By the Gods, he’d forgotten just how beautiful she was like this. He gave a harder, more firm rut of his hips against her and revelled in the high-pitched gasping sigh she gave. He stilled his movements somewhat when he heard her say his name and looked down curiously into her face.

“I should have known better,” she said with a whimper. “You and me. We can never just lie like this together and not want more from each other.”

“Need me to stop?” he asked softly without releasing her leg from his hold. He ended the question with a bite at the inside of his lip. He didn’t want to stop but was prepared to if she still wasn’t ready for him.

…Oh, sweet Goddess of Time, please be ready.

Rose looked up at him with hooded eyes. “Good God no,” she husked out desperately. “Don’t stop.” Her hand hooked up over the back of his neck and she pulled him down to crush his mouth against hers. She rolled onto her back, pulling him over him. Their mouths separated for just a short moment as he shifted to cover the length of her chest with his and settle his hips between the part of her legs.

At the press of his hard length against her, she drew a deep and breathy gasp that tapered toward a whimper of his name as she arched her back off the bed. She paired his name with that of her deity and hooked her ankles around his thighs to urge and control the pace of his rocking against her. At this blissful rate, she was ready to come completely undone underneath him even before they’d begun to discard any clothing at all.

His hand dragged heavily up along the mattress to clutch a fistful of the sheet beside her head. He grunted a low hiss and moan into her ear as the pace of his rocking increased. The way his breaths and his grunts panted against her ear, and the press of him against her pushed her toward the edge far quicker than she wanted to admit to, and she didn’t want to collapse and fall just yet. 

“We have all night,” he assured her against her ear. “Fall, Rose. I’ve got you.” He increased the focus of his movements. “I’ve always got you.”

Her chin lifted and she clutched a tight fistful of the back of his pyjama shirt as she howled out a breathy cry of his name. His mouth latched onto the soft skin of her throat and his hand shifted underneath her back as it lifted from the mattress, and he held her to him as he rocked her gently through her climax. He didn’t release his hold on her until her whimpering and gasping ebbed out to panted and shallow, gasping breaths.

He lowered her gently back down to the mattress and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “You’re beautiful,” he vowed with reverence as he lifted himself up onto his knees and drew his pyjama shirt up and over his head. He tossed it to one side and immediately moved back down to her again, covering her mouth in his and renewing the firm rocking of his hips against hers.

Somewhat sated for the moment, but definitely ready to continue, Rose curled both arms around his neck. The roll of her jaw and the seat of her swollen lips was one of post climax laziness, but it quickly shifted toward heat when his cool hand shifted up her shirt to draw his thumbs along the underneath of one of her breasts. She gasped and writhed underneath him again his name once more on her lips and tongue.

There was sudden and brilliant white light through the window that flickered and drowned, followed a second later by a loud booming crash of thunder that shook the windows inside their panes.

He couldn’t help but chuckle. “Seems appropriate. Thunder and lightning…”

Rose’s eyes flashed open with dawning horror. She struggled quickly underneath him. “Get off me,” she warned him desperately. “Off, Doctor. Now!”

He immediately rolled to one side. His eyes were blown wide even as his brows crashed together. He watched her as she moved about in light panic, checking the seat of her clothing and even the smoothness of her hair – which was incredibly confusing for him to watch.

“Rose?”

She looked at the window as another brilliant flickering light heralded the coming thunderclap and then looked to him with apology in her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Doctor. I really am. But we can’t. Not right now…”

“But what?” he asked with a perplexed and somewhat frustrated expression. “Why not? What’s wrong?”

At the close of the crash of thunder, as the vibration in the home ceased, her bedroom door flew open. Alirra wailed with fear as she ran toward the bed. Her voice was a series of gulping, terrified sobs as she held her arms up to her mother.

“Oh my poor baby,” Rose cooed gently as she pulled her little one onto the bed with her. She kissed at the young girl’s brow as she lifted her into the centre of the bed and looked up into the slowly dawn of understanding on face of her husband. “There’s no need to be scared Aly. Look. Papa’s here, too. He’ll protect you from the thunder and lightning, won’t you, Daddy?”

He opened his arms to his little girl. “Of course, I will,” he answered with a smile as Alirra shifted over to curl up in a whimpering little ball against his chest. “Always protect you from the storm, my little flubble.”

He looked to Rose with an expression that was a myriad of unreadable emotions. He nestled his head into the pillow and watched as she appeared to be counting down from five. No sooner had she gotten to one, and a taller figure appeared at the doorway.

“Oh Mark,” Rose managed with a perfectly feigned voice of relief. “I’m so glad you’re here. Me and Aly, we’re scared.”

“I..” he gulped and his flinch at a new crash of thunder was visible in a fresh flickering light outside the window. “I will, ehm. I’ll protect you mum.”

He scrambled over the mattress, his thin and awkward little body shuddering as he climbed over Rose and nestled in between his mother and his sister. He looked up into the curious and maybe slightly amused eyes of his father and shrank just slightly. “Ehm…?”

“Good thing you’re here,” the Doctor said with a smile that conveyed relief. “Because I really didn’t know if I had it in me to protect and cuddle the both of them.” He scruffed at the young boy’s head. “Thanks, buddy.”

Mark pulled his mother’s arms around him and then settled with his arms around his sister. “I’ll keep you safe,” he said with a yawn. “’Cause I’m brave.”

“Yes you are,” Rose assured him as she nestled into her pilow. “My little hero.” She lifted her eyes to the Doctor’s and even though she could see that his gaze contained a glint of amusement, she gave him a smile of apology. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed to him over the top of her son’s head. 

He stretched an arm across the space between them and held her cheek in his hand. “You have nothing to apologise for,” he assured her. He looked down at the heads of their two children, and then back up to look into her face. His expression was one of complete and utter contentment. “And certainly not for this.” He leaned across to kiss her gently on the mouth and chuckled at the whine of protest from their son. “My hearts,” he vowed. “They beat for you, Rose.”

“I love you too,” she said with a sleepy smile. “Tomorrow night we can maybe – you know – pick this up, yeah?”

“Of course,” he whispered softly as he watched her eyes slide closed.

He let his eyes drift along the three people lying in bed with him: his wife, his son, and his precious little daughter, and he exhaled a contented breath of reverence toward them all. With the lightning still flashing and the thunder following with a crash, he let his eyes slip closed to join his young family in their slumber.

His mind, constantly whirring as it was, though, wouldn’t offer him too much freedom from the conversation he had this evening with his brother and Phiroi, nor would it give him peace from the knowledge of an assassin lurking within their midst.

He considered slipping away to begin his research analysis, and to maybe set up some tighter security measures around the house where Phennea was concerned, but a whimper and a nuzzle from his little girl against his chest, and he quickly abandoned that idea.

Brax was up. The wolves were up. Leela and Andred were onsite and ready to defend the entire household. They could do without him for at least one night, right?

Surely it could all wait until tomorrow.

~~oooOOOooo~~


	18. Abhorrent Behaviour

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Abhorrent behaviour, Irving Braxiatel!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At the request of GingerGoldRose below is some more of me crossing into uncomfortable territory for me. She wanted some Brax nookie, and so I wrote some Brax nookie. 
> 
> Well. It isn't exactly what I would consider graphic part A into Slot B smut. Porno-stuff isn't my thing... but it is on the racy side, even I have to admit that. Much more racy than I have strayed before... And, of course, Brax being Brax, there is a little of that formal-type-stuff that you might expect form a pure time Lord/Lady coupling that is absent with the Doctor and Rose.
> 
> Unlike last chapter, where the ending mean't very little to the story, in this one it's the ending that matters. So once again, I've provided you with a ~~oooOOOooo~~ break so you know where the nookie finishes and the story picks up again.
> 
> I know it's Brax and Romana, not the Doctor and Rose.... but I really hope that you enjoy and are not too skeeved out.

~~oooOOOooo~~

While it was completely unnecessary for him to do as his mind and time sense was more than capable of providing the relevant information, Irving Braxiatel checked the expensive timepiece on his wrist to see just how late it was. There was a slight whine in his breath and a roll in his eyes as he noted the unreasonable early morning hour of 2:30am. Speaking with Phiroi after Thete had left to go join Rose in her bed had gone on for much longer than he had intended. He’d missed several messages on his phone, many of which came from the same person. Someone who he’d arranged to meet at 11pm relative time. He’d missed that meeting near the London Eye, and therefore the last message he’d received from them had been a particularly frustrated few lines of text.

_“Lord Braxiatel._

_I do not like this planet, nor its unevolved primitive inhabitants, and yet I answered your call to appear rather than simply forward you the information you required._

_For reasons not defined nor explained you have quite rudely found it unnecessary to adhere to your commitment to meet. I therefore find myself questioning if it is at all necessary to share with you the information you were seeking._

_However, as I do know that you would not have reached out to me in the first place if it wasn’t an imperative, and with the fear that not having this information may well involve the mortality of the two of us, I find myself in the rather unfortunate condition of having to rein in my vindictive nature to share anyway._

_Embedded in your Capsule navigation system is the coordinate information your requested. Use our usual passcoding information for access. The old girl will get you to where you need to go. Do note that the Timelines of this planet are volatile and unstable with reapers at its door, and therefore I will recommend extreme caution, spare regenerations, and firepower if you have it. You’re dealing with Rassilon’s work here, you’ll need all you can get._

_Better yet, track down and send in Thete. This is – as his human companions say - right up his alley._

_IB”_

Braxiatel stood at the doorway to the bedroom that he shared with Romana as he read the message. He had a hand pressed against the doorframe, slouched into a tired lean, and used a heavy swipe of his thumb to scroll through the texts. By Omega’s hand, that man was a long-winded fool, wasn’t he? All that nonsense to basically say: “ _You’re an inconsiderate woprat. Check your Capsule nav system. Danger: You might die_. _Better let Thete die instead_.”

“No,” he breathed out quietly with a look toward the closed bedroom door beside his, where he knew his brother was at rest. “I’ll handle this one, myself, I think.”

He looked back to his door and gently pushed it open. With Romana having retired at least three hours ago, he had expected complete darkness inside the room. He was surprised to find it quite brightly lit from the streetlights reflecting off low-lying clouds outside the window. The room was therefore cast in an orange glow, rather that the typical blue glow that an Earth evening offered. It felt quite similar to how the lights of a Gallifreyan evening would stream in through the window. Braxiatel could understand why Romana left the drapes open. She always did love a Gallifreyan evening.

His phone bussed inside his pocket, and Braxiatel let out a quiet huff and turned to the wall. He lifted his arm to press his forearm into the wall level with his head and slouched to scroll through the message with his other hand. The glow of the face of the phone in the relative darkness of the room strained his eyes just a bit and he hissed in a breath of annoyance. His annoyance deepened to find it was just a random text message from a store on Zuucaks that he’d made a purchase at about fifty years ago advising of a friends and family sale. 

“Unsubscribe,” he murmured quietly to himself.

“Irving?”

He felt a shudder down along his spine at the soft call of his given name from the bed. Romana very rarely ever called him anything except _Brax_ or _Braxiatel_ … or _Bastard_ if she was in a particularly incandescent mood due to him behaving badly. Really, he could count on one hand how many times she had called him _Irving_ – and that had only been since his most recent regeneration … since the two of them had begun to explore the more primitive-types of behaviours that his previous bodies had considered with disdain. Why now was she calling him _that_ name?

Without lowering the arm he still held at the wall, he slowly turned his head to look past his bicep toward her. “My Hearts, I didn’t mean to wake you…”

Any remaining breath within him escaped entirely upon seeing her. Completely naked except for the transparent silken gown that hung from her shoulders toward her ankles, her figure shone bathed in the golden-amber glow coming in through the window.

His strength failed him completely and almost dropped him to a knee. His voice lost all sound but a whisper. “Romana?”

She held out her hand to him, her palm upward and her fingers in a light curl of invitation. “I need connection to you, husband,” she pleaded in a voice completely void of the fierce, firm demands typical for Gallifrey’s former Lady President. “I’ve missed you.”

A shudder rocked him from head to toe, and he felt all of his blood leave his magnificent brain to pool within another part of him he considered to be a quite magnificent within this incarnation. He stood still for a brief moment, enough to take her image deeply inside the deepest recesses of his mind where he could call on it at will and exhaled a reverent breath. 

“You are breathtaking,” he breathed out after a moment as his hands dropped to the hook fastening of his trousers to release it with a flick of his fingers. He gave a shove at his trousers, dropping the stiff black fabric in a chino twill puddle at his feet, followed by the soft flop of his red boxer briefs on top of them. Wearing only his crimson oxford shirt, a pair of Argyle socks held up to his calves with a black pair of sock garters, he stepped out of his pants and trousers and walked toward her. He paused just within reach and dropped down to a knee at her feet with a bowed head. “My Hearts,” he chanted lightly with his hand held at the centre of his chest. “I seek your consent to gaze upon you.” His voice shuddered. “With all of the worship you deserve of one as unworthy of you as I.”

“You may,” she answered him huskily. She watched the slow rise of his head and felt the deliberate trace of his eyes up the length of her calves, her thighs, the pause as they reached her centre, and then the slow lift up over her belly to finally look up into her eyes over the gentle swell of her breasts. “My mate, you have my consent for connection of our minds, body, and soul.”

“Connect,” he requested with gentle firmness as his hands slipped under the lowest hem of her transparent gown to cup his hands around her ankles. “And give yourself over to me.”

She let out a whimper at his hands around her ankles and then gasped out her consent for connection as she fell backward onto her bed to leave herself completely at his mercy. 

He was still on a knee before her, her calves and knees parted either side of him. He still waited for her to say connect rather than simply consent and lifted one of her ankles to his lips. He drew in a deep breath of her skin bathed in time’s perfume and exhaled a shuddering growl before drawing her ankle to hips lips. “Connect,” he said again with a bite of his lips around the very softest part of her ankle.

“Irving,” she whimpered out almost pathetically when his lips softly met with her ankle. “Connect, my Hearts. I’m yours.”

He felt her mind wash over him before he could consider making the telepathic connection himself. His breath huffed out a shuddering exhale as the desire and pleasure of hers became desires and pleasures of himself. He drew the very tip of his tongue up the entire length of her calf and let it swirl around the inside of her knee for just a moment before he nibbled her skin with nips of his lips that took his mouth up the entire length of her inner thigh.

She writhed with urgency and anticipation underneath his purposefully torturous ministrations, finally urging him upward with a leg over his shoulder and a low rut of her hips that brought her to the very tip of his nose. His name was once again on her lips, and the desperation within her contradicted every single moment of strength and power that had defined her entire presidency. She was hopeless at his hand right now and completely under his power. Power she had so willingly relinquished to him.

Braxiatel wore a smile on his face as he evaded the one part of her she was so desperate for him to pay any form of attention to. Instead he held her knee on his shoulder and focused on the soft silky skin on her thigh, and the taste of arousal that exploded on his tongue as he slowly allowed himself to move toward the apex of her need.

Her pants and gasps fell toward pleading whimpers and she urged him as gently as she could with guiding movements of her legs, and the rolling shift of her hips toward his mouth. He wasn’t allowing any more than the brush of the very tip of his nose over the most sensitive part of her. it wasn’t anywhere near enough, but each of those tiny little morsels of contact was like an explosion of pleasure that drew out the most wanton of sounds from deep within her throat.

“Irving,” she panted out desperately. “Please. It’s not enough. I need more.”

He stopped his ministrations on her thigh and shifted his mouth toward her centre. He gave it a firm burst of air through tightly pursed lips, smiling at the way her hips bucked in response. “Your hearts,” he asked her with a lift of his eyes to look down along the length of her belly and chest, through the valley of parted breasts, over her stretched throat toward the bottom of her chin that hid her pleasure-contorted expression from him. “Do they beat for me, Romana? Will they always beat for me?”

Her chest heaved, her breasts falling and rising to completely obstruct her face from view. She didn’t look down at him, instead she arched her back just slightly in search of his mouth against her thighs once more and panted out a sound to the affirmative. “They don’t beat without you,” she vowed firmly. Her voice then trilled through a series of syllables that sounded out the name of him that only the two of them shared, and ended with a vow, ancient and solemn.

That was more than enough for him. He said nothing, did nothing, except shift forward to run the flat of his tongue along her entire length, dragging it up heavy until he touched her with only its very tip. He swirled the pointed tip of his tongue around her tightened centre, thrilling at the way she bucked and loudly gasped. He repeated his ministrations once more, hungering for her mewls and the desperate spread of her legs with each drag of his tongue that demanded her give her more.

Feeling her pleasure as his own, and Braxiatel found himself nearing a completion he wasn’t entirely ready for just now. The taste of her and the sounds she made, the pleasure she was feeling him across their connection, and he knew that she needed no more coaxing. Surface pleasure was pleasure but it was nowhere near enough. Not for her, and certainly not for him. She ached to be filled, and he needed to fill her, so he took himself firmly in hand and lifted to his feet only high enough that he could move into her with one quick forward movement.

As he moved into her and deeply completed their connection, Romana let out gurgling, incoherent cry of his name. Her back arched off the bed completely and the leg that was still hooked over his shoulder squeezed a tight grip to pull him down over her. He bit his lips against the inside of her knee and groaned out a long growl against her skin as he pushed and pulled long strokes of himself within her. His position was less than ideal for him, but it granted her the deepest of pleasures, and so he held onto her thigh and huffed out against her knee knowing if he dared to drop over the top of her to give attention to her breasts or her gloriously cursing mouth, he’d stumble off the bed, out of her body, and onto the floor…

…And he didn’t think he’d have enough coherence in him at all to make it back up onto his feet and onto the mattress to start over. 

He caught her flailing hand in his and thread his fingers in between hers, kept hold of her thigh, and used the sounds she made as his grounding and his guide to drive her toward the senselessness she so sorely needed him to take her to.

And by the Gods and Gallifrey herself, he needed to lose himself in her as much as she needed to lose herself around him.

~~oooOOOooo~~

She wasn’t sure if it was the toe inside her nostril, or the shove of a little bottom pushing her off the bed that finally woke her up with a snap, but Rose Tyler was thrown from her too-short slumber as her backside met with the cool wooden floor of her bedroom. She gasped, gulped, and then whimpered as she rubbed at her hip and crawled up to her knees to investigate the current occupancy level of her bed to determine just what kind of vacancy was available to her.

The Doctor wasn’t taking up a great deal of room on his own, in fact he took up less than a third of the mattress. The kids, however, between them they’d had taken up every available space on the bed with starfished limbs and diagonal sleeping positions. Mark was spread out completely, arms and legs wide. Alirra had managed to flip herself upside down on the bed and lay in much the same position that Mark had achieved, only her feet had managed to locate themselves in the faces of both parents – extended completely across Mark’s face – and her arms spread wide out either side of her.

There was no way in any form of Tetris positioning that Rose would fit on the small half-yard patch of space left on the bed. So with that realisation dawning, Rose decided to abandon any efforts at fitting in to this tangle of limbs and figured that the couch might just be the best option to complete what little amount of time was left for sleeping.

She pulled on her silken red robe from the door and quietly unlatched the door to step into the hallway. Once the door was closed, she stretched up into a high extension and opened her mouth into a jaw cracking yawn so deep that she felt a stretch inside her chest at the massive breath she was forced to take in. Her head spun just slightly at the sudden rush of oxygen and held her hand on the wall for a moment to let her brain stabilise itself and shake out the clinch in her muscles.

As her mind settled and her hearing returned with a slight ring and zing in her ears, she caught sounds from Romana’s room that had her still in place with shock. Shock quickly shifted to utter amusement to hear the name of her Brother in Law called out with such unbridled pleasure, and Rose had to let out a little laugh.

“Atta boy, Brax,” she whispered to herself with a smile. “Seems like you got the hang of this incredibly abhorrent practice pretty quick, didn’t you?”

She made a point in her mind to give him a good teasing about it in the morning and plotted just which way to best give him a playful mocking for it as she walked down the darkened stairwell to the main hallway. She breathed out an imitation of the cry she heard upstairs, wondering if that might be appropriate, then deemed it the most in appropriate thing in the entire universe to do… if only because it might upset Romana.

And then, because she couldn’t possibly imagine herself referring to him as anything other than _Brax_. She knew his chosen name was Irving, but she felt awfully uncomfortable saying it without Braxiatel at the other end of it.

Looks like she might have to withhold pie from him in the morning and relentlessly tease him instead. At the very least she’d have to remind him that such activities really should be conducted with a lower volume. She’d hate to have to figure out an excuse as to why sounds of that nature were coming from their Tonza and Tonzarina’s bedroom in the late evening.

“Tonza Brax is exercising?” she practiced to herself with a lift in her chin and a look toward the ceiling as she walked the hallway toward the living room. “Tonzarina Romana stubbed her toe and Tonza Brax is fixing it?”

Ahh, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it, or if the two of them were indeed planning to stay for the long term until Gallifrey was safe once more, she could demand that the Doctor and Brax set about soundproofing specific bedrooms.

She rounded the corner of the hallway toward the living room and paused with a heavy sigh at what she saw inside. Her couch was already occupied by a very large Gallifreyan wolf, who took up the entire length of it with his gigantic body and long limbs. There was no way she could convince that old boy to scootch over and let her have a spot. He was opposed to snuggles as a rule, and was particularly grumpy about it if it mean interrupting his sleep.

She then looked to where Tiallu and their pup slept in wonder if she could snaffle a spot near them. Two bodies lain as a pair of spoons atop a fluffy animal skin that were no doubt snaffled from the refugee ships took up that space as well. Leela and Andred looked way too comfortable in front of the dying fire in her fireplace. Although she did notice a light shudder from the sleeping Leela and determined that the poor woman was likely slightly chilled. A Time Lord snuggle was among the greatest wonders in the world, and despite their apparent vehemence against cuddles, they were ridiculously good at it. The only downside of it was that their chilled bodies didn’t offer much in the way of warmth, even when they did attempt to regulate their core temperature to something a shade warmer than normal. 

She flicked a crocheted blanket from the back rest of one of her armchairs and warily approached the sleeping woman. Having performed this careful routine several times during their friendship on Gallifrey when Andred, Leela, and their sons spent the night and refused to take a bed, she knew that Leela slept very lightly, and always with a knife in her holster. Her approach was slow and careful, her breath held deeply inside her chest as she tried her best to put a cover over her without waking her.

She winced and held herself backward when Leela stirred with the sudden weight of a blanket on her, but she didn’t jump up with a screech and a holler with her knife in the air. Instead she merely smiled contentedly. “Thank you, Rose.”

“You’re very welcome, Leela,” she whispered in reply. “Sleep well.”

Leela’s eyes didn’t open, but her smile remained. “You should sleep as well, Rose. I can feel your tiredness.”

“I’m okay,” she assured her.

Her eye cracked open. “Do you wish to join us?”

“I’m sorry?”

“It will be easier to help protect you if you are here in my arm’s reach.”

“Go to sleep,” Rose said with a laugh. “I’m fine. Safe with my wolf protectors, and my Time Lord upstairs.” She drew in a breath and stood up straight. “Besides, I’m at home. What could possibly happen to me here?”

“The universe is not a woman who likes to be tempted,” Leela reminded her with a sigh under her breath. “And you just tempted her.”

“Good night, Leela,” she said with a light laugh. “We’ll catch up the morning, yeah? Have to plan a girl’s night with you, me, and Romana before you leave.”

“Good night, Rose.”

She rubbed her hands on her silk robe and let out a sigh as she walked back into the hallway and headed toward the kitchen. Sure, the living room wasn’t the only option available to her as a place to crash out for the evening. But based on what she just heard upstairs, she wasn’t going to try to take one of the kid’s beds for the rest of the night. The TARDIS was an option, as was Brax’s capsule, but she had long learned not to step into one for any length of time without one of their pilots close by. She was scared that she’d go to sleep and end up waking up on Mars or something with no way to get home…

…of course if that did happen, there were two other travel capsules nearby that would come get her. But, really, she didn’t want that bother.

So little all else to do, really, but make herself f a pot of tea, make a snack, and read a newspaper or a book while she waited for the rest of the household to wake up – or stop with the nookie – whatever came first.

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand as she drew in another deep breath with a jaw-cracking yawn. It finished with a moaning sound that was high-pitched and less groany than it was a whimper, and she shuddered out vocally as she filled her electric kettle with water from the tap. She set it on the cradle and flicked the little on-switch at the base. Only half conscious, Rose moved around her kitchen to prepare herself a mug of tea with autonomy. She barely noticed when the flyscreen door toward the backward slid along the runner and someone stepped into the room.

“Hello Rose,” a familiar female voice crooned in with a smile attached to the voice. 

Rose lifted sleepy eyes to hers and offered her as fake a grin as she was being given. “Hello Phennea. I guess you weren’t told about the curfew for access to this part of the house? Noone is allowed in here between 10pm and 5am. Gives me time to clean up and prepare things for my family before you lot get going in here.”

“Well then forgive my intrusion,” she said with obvious facetiousness. “I am having difficulties sleeping in this new …” she breathed out. “This new _normal_ for my people.” She looked around. “The temperature of this planet take time to get used to, I suspect.”

“Same with the heat of Gallifrey, really,” she answered with a shrug. “But if the Human can handle it, I’m sure the Time Lady can.”

Phennea hummed with a smile. “You really don’t like me much, do you?”

Rose looked at her warily. “You really haven’t given me any reason to,” she answered with a shrug. “First time I met you, you snogged my husband, right in front of me.”

“In my defense, I didn’t know you were his mate.” She looked her up and down with a deliberately raking eye. “Which is something I can expect understanding for. You are, after all, a Human, and Thete is a Time Lord.”

“Doctor,” Rose corrected her sharply. “His name is the Doctor.”

“I always knew him as Thete,” she said with a shrug and a high sigh. “Old habits will break hard, I suppose.” She looked toward the hallway. “It’s my understanding that Braxiatel arrived this evening?” She gave a laugh of familiarity toward both men. “Both of the Lungbarrow boys under one roof and the universe hasn’t imploded yet. That _is_ impressive.”

“The Academy was nine hundred years ago,” Rose muttered dryly. “They are both very different men to what they were when you knew them.”

“Very, very different,” she remarked with a smile. She slid her eyes to Rose. “Although only in Body, really. Thete – I mean _the Doctor_ – still seems very much the same man as he was when I knew him.” She exhaled. “And did I know him _well_ …”

“If you’re trying to get a rise, you won’t,” Rose said with her own huff of annoyance. “I’m too old and too tired for those kinds of games. If you think you can have another go with the Doctor, then you’re mistaken. He’s my husband, soul mated to me. His hearts beat for me, and it’s best you understand that, yeah? You had your chance, and you blew it.” 

Phennea hummed with a smile. “I understand. Of course I do. And how about Braxiatel, then? Still a stoic, handsome icicle?”

“Nothing cold about him,” she said with a shrug. “He’s my best friend. Love him to bits.”

“Braxiatel doesn’t have friends,” Phennea corrected her with warning in her tone. “Let alone _best_ friends.” She rolled her shoulder in time with the roll of her eyes. “Too busy betraying them for his own gain to keep them.”

“Show’s what _you_ know.”

She flicked her eyes toward her. There was a lift in her brow that was more condescending than any words could be. “It’s his reputation,” she answered slowly. “Everyone knows that if you haven’t yet been betrayed by Irving Braxiatel, it’s because he hasn’t met you yet.”

“I trust him with my life,” she vowed with fierceness in her tone. 

Phennea hummed out a laugh. “Yes. Well. That might not be a real good idea for you to do, dear Rose.” She leaned forward with a smile on one side of her mouth and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Because when it really comes down to it, he’s not very good at keeping those he cares about safe.”

Rose narrowed her eyes to a glare and leaned down to sneer into Phennea’s eyes. “And who do you think you -”

“You are now under a hypnotic trance,” Phennea said smoothly with a smile to one side of her mouth. “You will obey my commands and answer every question.”

“I will,” Rose complied quickly. Her eyes were now locked open and her body completely stilled.

Phennea sighed and shook her head. She stood up straight and pressed her hands into the countertop. “I suppose neither of them told you that I’m a specialist in hypnotism.” She shrugged. “Well, so’s Thete. He may have scored marginally higher in hypnosis than I did back at the academy, but I’ve since honed my skills.” She looked to Rose. “And your frail human mind is very easily manipulated.”

She tapped her fingers on the countertop and spared a quick glance toward the hallway to see if anyone was coming, then looked to Rose. “Right. You are going to tell me everything you know about the Resistance against Rassilon. All of it. You’re also going to tell me all about what makes you so special that makes my greatest ancestor want you taken alive.” She then drew in a deep breath and narrowed her eyes. “And finally, you’re going to tell me how I can reach Gallifrey from here. I need to report in, and I can’t seem to find a way to breach the dimensional walls from here. Which one of those capsules will give me the ability to contact Rassilon?”

Rose drew in a deep breath. “What I know about the Resistance against Rassilon…”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	19. Attack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phennea tries to get information out of Rose

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very short chapter today. I literally only got 30 minutes to write today, so this was all I could pull out in that time. Is it rushed? Maybe, but it was a little bit of a tough one to make work ... so many factors to - ehm - factor in. 
> 
> And why, you ask, did I only have 30 mins? Well, I did originally have a couple of hours, but my laptop blue screen of deathed me after one and a half hours of writing and I hadn't hit save at any point within that one and a half hours, therefore I lost the whole damn lot of it.. I had to try and remember what I wrote ... and failed miserably at it. Blue screen of death .. I thought they got rid of that in the 90's!
> 
> Warning, it gets gross at the very end there. If you aren't one for blood and stuff, I recommend missing the last maybe five chapters or so?
> 
> psst: Action isn't quite my forte, but I am trying. Be kind. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy ... and yes, despite how utterly hopeless and ridiculous it is right now, I do have a plan in place. Know that. It's not quite as crazy as it looks. Well, it is crazy, sure ... but ... oh, whatever...

~~oooOOOooo~~

If there was one thing that Rose Tyler did not believe in, it was the power of hypnotism. In her youth and on school trips, she’d been to many magic shows that involved at least one hypnotist in their lineup. Adorable as she was when she was a wide-eyed youngster, she found herself hand selected by the show’s organisers as one of the people who would end up on stage during the performance. The selection was always made before the show started by a suit-wearing individual who would pull her aside with an invitation to become part of the show. Inside the rather skeevy invitation there was almost always a warning that she should make sure that she played along with what the entertainer asked her to do while under his “influence”. If she was a good girl and played along, then she’d receive a bag of prizes on her way out.

As an Estate girl who would never be able to afford a T-Shirt or a hat from the souvenir stand, the offer of a bag full of kit was a good enough incentive to toe the line and be an actress for a little while. Even if some of the things she was ordered to do onstage were downright embarrassing.

So that meant: when it came to people making claims of prowess in the field of hypnosis, Rose would feel herself more than confident enough to roll her eyes and tell them they were full of shit… or she would play along with it for a while – just to see what she could get out of the encounter for herself.

In this instance, it was information. She was pretty sure that the Doctor’s Ex was up to something nefarious, and while the Doctor himself might not have indicated to her that he felt anything was awry, her wolves definitely did. She trusted those two big fur-babies implicitly. If they didn’t trust someone, there was usually a very good reason for it. She’d made the decision almost the moment they returned to the house that she would work out what this woman’s deal _really_ was. She wasn’t quite sure just how she was going to find just what the deal was, just that she was going to figure it out.

So when Phennea interrupted Rose’s defense of Braxiatel with the claim that she’d put her under a hypnotic trance , Rose took that opportunity. She was practiced enough to know that all she had to do to keep up the charade was to keep her eyes wide and unfocused and her body stiff as it awaited instruction.

Rose tried hard to maintain a zombie-like posture and expression as Phennea bragged about her skill in the hypnotic arts. She wanted to laugh and call her on her bullshit. Oh, wouldn’t that be fun? But instead, she opted to make Brax proud of her by snaffling him some intelligence.

“Right,” Phennea said after a moment of bragging. She leaned down to look into Rose’s eyes. “You are going to tell me everything you know about the Resistance against Rassilon. All of it. You’re also going to tell me all about what makes you so special that makes my greatest ancestor want you taken alive.” She then drew in a deep breath and narrowed her eyes. “And finally, you’re going to tell me how I can reach Gallifrey from here. I need to report in, and I can’t seem to find a way to breach the dimensional walls from here. Which one of those capsules will give me the ability to contact Rassilon?”

Rose drew in a deep breath. “What I know about the Resistance against Rassilon…” She drew in a deep breath and swayed just slightly. “Is that there isn’t a resistance against Rassilon. The house of Lungbarrow respects and admires his Supreme Lord President Rassilon.”

“That’s a lie,” Phennea hissed out.

“I am under your control,” Rose reminded her. “I cannot lie.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Rose noted a shift in the doorway, a silent, slender figure in tan. There was a small glint of light off the blade of a knife, and although Leela moved within the bright lights of the kitchen, she may as well have been stalking her prey under the curtain of night.

Rose tried hard not to shift her eyes to follow Leela’s movement at all, but she did lift a finger up from the counter to let her know that she was much more in control that it appeared. From the closed doors of the medical capsule, Leela gave a slow nod of her head. She held her knife in her hand with the blade tucked up against her wrist in readiness to strike if necessary.

Phennea had completely missed the silent movement of the huntress in the room. Her own frustration tunneling her focus toward Rose rather than the room around her. “How can you tell me there isn’t a Resistance party here in your home? The brother’s Lungbarrow have long been considered members of the movement.”

“Your information is incorrect,” Rose answered in an emotionless tone of voice. “Praised be our Lord President.”

“You’re a human,” she snapped petulantly with a roll inside her eyes. “How dare you praise the leader of _my_ people.” She lifted her chin and leaned down forward over the counter. “And how about you, then? What makes you so special, so remarkable, that my Ancestor is so keen to have you brought to him?”

“I’m human,” she answered simply. “Nothing more special than that.”

Phennea let out a huff. “Rassilon despises your kind.”

“Rassilon despises his own kind,” Rose offered emotionlessly. 

Phennea’s eyes flicked quickly toward her. “The sons and daughters of time are his people, and he loves them,” she corrected. “It is the likes of your mate and his brother who despise their own people.” A smile crossed her features at that moment. “And speaking of…”

Rose waited with unfocused eyes as Phennea levered herself upward and shot a look to the hallway door. Seeing it clear she looked back to Rose and slid a knife from the wooden butcher’s block at the end of the counter. “Your beloved. Your mate. The one your heart beats for.” She held the very end of the knife’s handle in her fingers to have the very tip of the blade pointed upward. “Kill him.” Her grin darkened. “And make sure you look into his eyes as you do it. Through every remaining regeneration he has left, let him watch you kill each and every one of them. Break his hearts as you pierce them with this knife.”

That seemed to be just about the limit for Leela’s patience. As Rose shifted a slow and furious gaze toward the woman, Leela made her approach. She moved from the doors of the capsule, and twisted smoothly around the table and chairs in between without making a sound. So smooth was her approach that there wasn’t even a shift in the air to herald her movement.

She spoke in a dangerous whisper against Phennea’s ear as she brought her blade around her shoulder to press it against her throat. “Only a lazy coward will send in someone else to make their kill.”

Phennea shorted, the knife at her throat not seeming to alarm her in the slightest. “The savage who thinks she’s so sage. I’m not the one intending to take down their prey from behind.”

“You are not my prey to take,” Leela whispered heavily against her hear. “I am just holding you in place so that the mate of the one you wish harmed can make the kill.” Her eyes shifted toward Rose. “Take vengeance for your beloved, Rose.”

Phennea laughed. “She can’t,” she practically sang. “Your human friend is under my control. I have her in an unbreakable trace. Without me giving her instructions, she’s nothing but a brainless statue.”

“Am I?” Rose asked her smoothly, breaking form her stillness and flicking cold eyes toward her. 

Phennea’s eyes flashed wide. “How were you not affected by my hypnosis?”

“One,” Rose began with a curl in her lip. “Hypnosis is bullshit. No such thing in my experience. Better people than you have tried and failed.” She then shrugged. “And two. Even if you did have half a chance, my mind is protected with shields put in place by a Prydonian master of telepathy. You don’t get in there if I don’t want you too.”

“Thete,” she growled out. “Of course.”

“Actually no,” she corrected with a smile stretching wide across her face. “Braxiatel. A _just in case_ protective measure when we left Gallifrey.” She stepped around the breakfast counter; her eyes narrowed with fury. “And I reckon he’s not going to take too kindly to you wanting to kill his brother.” She paused and creased up her face as she reconsidered that. “I mean to say that you want _me_ to kill him.”

“You say that like you’ll get the chance to tell him,” Phennea threatened. She still held the knife she’d ordered Rose to kill the Doctor with and quietly palmed the handle. 

“One call of his name,” Rose warned. “Just one, and he’ll be here in seconds. Him, _and_ the Doctor.”

“And do what?” she asked incredulously. “You act like their mere presence is some form of godly rescue act that will immediately save you from any disaster. Your Doctor, he hates guns, so I can’t see him having any use other than trying to talk his way out of it. And Brax? He’s as hot winded as Thete is. Both of them, completely useless.”

Leela chuckled against her ear. “There is more to the Doctor and to Braxiatel than you see with your eyes,” she warned. “I would not let my guard down with either of them.”

Phennea shifted her eyes to the side in an almost condescending look toward Leela. “Might be best you don’t, either.”

“I do not what?” Leela asked curiously.

“Let your guard down,” she answered with a whimpering whisper that twisted toward a laugh. “Particularly when you have prey who knows how to fight back.”

The laughter switched to a sneer as Phennea punched her hand up into the small gap between Leela’s arm and her own shoulder. She rolled and spun out of the Huntress’ hold without the sharp end of her blade being able to touch at her skin. Th blade of her knife swept through the air with her turn, slicing a line across Leela’s arm and spraying a line of crimson blood across the countertop.

Leela growled and ignored the pain and the wash of warm blood down her arm. She leaned low and forward, throwing her knife from one hand to the other. There was a smile of threat on her face. “I am sorry, Rose. Now, she is mine.”

“Let me get Andred,” Rose offered out urgently, knowing he was not only the one closest by, but also definitely the biggest. “He can help.”

“I need no help, Rose,” Leela said with a smile. There was barely a huff in her breath as she spoke. “And now, Assassin. Assassinate me.”

A loud shuffle sounded from the living room. There was a growl and then a thump, then the tikka tikka of sharp extended claws on ceramic tile flooring. Rose’s eyes immediately widened as everything around her shifted toward a world of horrific slow motion. She could see each movement before it dared occur, and her mouth formed an O-shape of terror to know that she was helpless to stop any of it.

Soliarn burst through the doorway to the kitchen with a leap that kicked him off the doorframe to shoot as a white comet through the air toward the two women.

Leela was thrown backward with another strike of Phennea’s blade, this time across her hip. She dropped into a spinning crouch that brought her own knife downward into Phennea’s thigh and dragged up toward her hip. As Phennea let out a cry and attempted to rush foreward toward Leela, her knife raised in the air to strike, a strong set of glistening white teeth clamped down around her wrist. The knife was immediately released and fell with a loud clatter to the ground. When she saw the blue white claws of her wolf turn red as they forced Phennea to the ground, Rose let out a shriek.

She had no idea which name she called, if it was a cry for Soliarn to stop, for Andred, Braxiatel, _or_ the Doctor…

…It wouldn’t have mattered which name it was. In no time, they’d all be there.

~~oooOOOooo~~

Irving Braxiatel admired his reflection of the floor to ceiling mirror in his room as he fastened the buttons down along his chest. Still only partially put together for now, he had procured himself a fresh outfit of a pair of black trousers and a crisp lime-green oxford shirt with deep green vertical pinstripes. Even if he did say so himself, he was looking pretty damn suave right now.

It may have had a lot to do with the glow in his cheeks and the rise in his shoulders that came from taking his beloved mate to her absolute peak. Proudly, he could say that he had levitated her so high above her own expectations that she could see the whole of eternity below them.

Not bad for a man who had just discovered the joys of physical mating…

He couldn’t shift his smile as he dropped his eyes to his cuffs and slipped the small button through to fasten them.

“Braxiatel?”

His smile dropped just slightly. Oh, she was back to Braxiatel now – not even bothering to build to it with Brax as the middle ground. That meant she wanted to talk about something he quite likely didn’t want to discuss right now. He tried not to show his shift in mood and didn’t look back at her as he focused on closing off the cuff of his other sleeve.

“Yes, Romana?”

“Where have you been these past several weeks?”

He let out a breath, swallowed thickly, and then drew in a breath. He still didn’t look at her, instead he undid his trousers to tuck in his shirt. “Giving you your space,” he answered somewhat coolly. He lifted his head back to the mirror to watch himself tuck in his shirt. “And running a couple of errands.”

“Meeting up with your future selves you mean,” she corrected from where she still lay on the bed.

“Actually, no,” he stated. “As I have no future selves ahead of me, I can quite honestly tell you that no, I have not met a future me.”

“Past, then?”

He smiled and shook his head as he looked down to fasten his trousers. “No. I haven’t physically met with any of my past or future selves. Not in a very long time.” He finally looked toward her but didn’t walk toward the bed – despite her naked form still very much on display to him. His breath did catch and softened. “Not since Pandora.” 

She winced at the reminder that name held to her but didn’t let that sway her from climbing off the mattress and make a slow walk toward him. “Can you promise me that, Brax? Do you vow to me that you have not been crossing your own timeline in search of whatever it is you’re looking for right now?”

His eyes lowered to her bared chest as she approached an he inhaled a breath of reverence. “By the stars, you are magnificent, Romana.”

“Don’t change the subject,” she warned him sharply. She then flicked her finger upward in an order for him to lift his eyes. “And look up here, thank you. I rescind your permission to look at me.”

“Do you now?” he asked with a narrowing in his eye. “And yet you bare yourself to me completely like a goddess. Tempting every desperate and infatuated part of me…”

“Not so desperate and infatuated that you aren’t willing to walk away from it,” she pointed out flatly. “You took both of us to climax only five microspans ago, Brax, and you’re already dressed and ready to leave.”

He shifted his head forward to kiss her cheek. He let out a disappointed breath when she turned away from him so that he only managed to kiss at the air beside her ear. “I do have something that I have to attend to,” he assured her firmly. “Something that I was supposed to see to this evening …” he exhaled and looked back at his own reflection. “Before I found myself in the position of having to return here.”

“You say that like it’s a chore to be with us,” she challenged him.

“There are days it is,” he huffed out.

“Braxiatel!” She seemed genuinely hurt by that comment. “How could you say such a thing?”

He turned and cupped his hands around her head, holding her with tender firmness while he stroked his thumbs along her cheeks. “Not you, Romana. By the Gods above you are the only calm I have in this existence. My light. The beat of my hearts.” He took a step in toward her, drawing her up against his chest. He loomed over her by a good foot, and he lowered his head to touch his forehead to the top of her hair. There was relief in him when he felt her arms move around his hips. “You are the better part of me, my beloved.”

“Then stay,” she insisted firmly. She lifted her chin to look up into his eyes. Her voice shifted toward the tone she would use in the capitol when any one of her councillors dared upset her and she had to issue demands to all of them. “I won’t allow you to leave me tonight. You _will_ remain here, in my bed, in my mind, in my soul, and curse you Irving, inside my body as well.”

“Is that a demand, my Lady President?” he purred with a smile.

“It’s my request,” she breathed out. “As your mate.”

“Your wish is my command,” he vowed with a smile and a dip of his head to claim her mouth tenderly.

He barely had a moment to dip low and drop an arm around her bottom to pull her legs up and around his hips and there was an horrific sound from downstairs.

“That’s Rose,” Romana said quickly. She dropped her legs from his waist and rushed to the end of the bed to retrieve her robe. “Something’s wrong. Get the Doctor and see what’s going on. I’ll shield the children.”

Braxiatel immediately moved toward the door. He flung it open with a hard flick of his hand and burst into the hallway. He was met by the Doctor, dishevelled, barely awake and in only a pair of pyjama pants and a wrinkled grey undershirt at the door.

“Was that Rose?” the Doctor asked with mild disorientation as he fought against the last remnants of a deep sleep.

There was another panicked and desperate yell from downstairs, and neither man questioned it further. The both of them leaped down multiple steps at a time, then vaulted over the bannister. The sharp and zinging metallic scent of blood, both Gallifreyan and Human, assaulted their senses before they’d made it halfway down the hallway.

“Heaven’s no,” the Doctor managed to mutter out with mild calm. Any calm he had in him evaporated into complete panic when both he and Braxiatel made it into the kitchen.

Deep orange-scarlet fluid pooled on the floor, crimson streaks marked the breakfast bar and counter. Leela and Rose, both of them wearing far too much of orange-scarlet and crimson fluids, battled with a relatively stain-free Andred to hold back the blood-stained wolf who fought against them to resume his attack on a gurgling, twitching, and whimpering figure on the floor.

“Soliarn!” The Doctor’s voice boomed loudly, full of heavy order that dared the wolf to defy him. “Stand down.”

The wolf looked toward the Doctor and snapped a hard shattering snap of his jaw in response. It was clear that he wanted to continue on task, but he did as ordered and took a step backward. He remained close, however, ready to attack again if necessary. His huffing and snarling were a clear message to the Doctor: forget your demands, he was here to protect the _ladies_ of Lungbarrow and Redloom.

The Doctor and Braxiatel coughed out identical sounds of shock and terror at the sight of Rose and Leela wearing an obscene amount of blood on the both of them.

“What in the name of Rassilon, Omega, and the Other happened here?” Braxiatel bit out with anger in his question. He pointed to the figure still gurgling on the floor. “And who is that?”

Rose dropped onto her ass directly in the centre of a bloody puddle and dropped her forehead into her bloody palm. She drew in a couple of breaths and waved her hand around the carnage as though .. it was just another day.. She looked up at him with tired eyes lined with amber tears. “You missed your coming home party, Brax.” Her mouth started to turn downward, but then quickly levelled out to neutral. She even forced a smile. “Surprise.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	20. Blood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are messy....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got a wee bit more time today than I had hoped -- but still not quite enough to really get down and dirty here.
> 
> This is a chapter that probably should come with warnings. It's not entirely pretty.
> 
> It does involve a non consensual telepathic encounter, so if this isn't your thing, i'd caution against reading at about the three-quarter mark. Please don't hate the Doctor, yeah? I mean, okay, it's not the first time he's done something like this. not in the slightest, not at all... but people in the fan fiction world do seem to be a little sensitive to this particular topic.... So do be warned.
> 
> I really hope you enjoy this. Now I can head into something else entirely.... you know, where I've been wanting to go since monday before I wrote myself into a hole I had to dig myself out of. Sighhhhh.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

The Doctor looked toward his bloodied wife with a horrified and perplexed contortion in his features. The scene before him had stilled him in place but not quite frozen him completely. To see her seated in a pool of blood and speaking of it in such a nonchalant manner, well that rooted him to the ground and made him completely immobile.

Braxiatel wasn’t rendered as immobile as his brother. With incensed fury creasing his typically smooth features, he took a long stride toward the medical capsule and whacked hard at it with the butt of a curled fist. “Phiroi!” he demanded in a voice demanding no argument. “Better get out here.”

He walked back toward the mess and set his hands on his hips to loom down over both Leela and Rose. It took some effort, but he managed to rein in a bit of the anger within him with a couple of very deep breaths through his nose. “Does any of that blood belong to either of you?” he asked with a strained voice.

Rose looked up at him looming high over her. She felt no sense of intimidation from him at all, but she didn’t like him towering up there like that. She drove a finger into the ground in front of the fold of her legs. “You wanna talk to me, Brax? Stop lording above me like you are and get down here to my level.” When he didn’t immediately crouch to her command, she lowered her nose and then gave it a hard wipe with the side of her wrist. The wipe of her hand had her gesture toward Leela. “She’s hurt,” she clarified gently. “I think she caught a couple of blades.”

“I am fine,” Leela assured at her side. “Surface wounds only.”

“Can’t believe she even got a look at ya,” Rose muttered with a shrug and a slow shift of her eyes toward the bloodied woman. “Gettin’ slow in your old age, Lee?”

Leela actually gave her a smile, her white teeth a shining contrast against the orange-crimson stain on her cheeks and nose. “It has been too long since I have had a worthy competitor. Blade against blade, speed against speed. I am almost unhappy that Soliarn joined the fight. We will never know who would have been the victor.”

“Oh, Leela all the way,” Rose said with a nod of her head and assurance in her tone. “Got no doubt about that.” She looked to Andred, who appeared to be completely horrified rather than swollen with pride at his mate as she had expected him to be. “Don’t you think so, Andred?”

“I just helped you both pull a 190-pound aggressive and vicious Dahrama wolf off its prey,” he admitted carefully. “Right now, I don’t know what to think.”

“He’s a big teddybear,” Rose said with a tender affectionate look toward the animal. “Aren’t you, baby?”

The Doctor found himself finally able to move and stepped around his brother. “How?” he asked with a broken sound to his voice. “How are you so calm about this, Rose?” He gestured to the scene. “How can you treat this like it’s nothing?”

She looked up at him. “How do you want me to be, Doctor?” she asked him quietly. “Really?”

“Showing a little more emotion than you are right now, Rose!” he barked incredulously. “Something, anything more than you are right now.” At his side, Braxiatel said his name with gentle warning. He sneered toward his brother, not quite registering the slowly dawning expression of fear on his face. “You can’t possibly tell me that you’re in any way comfortable with _this_.”

Rose let out a short laugh. It was a sound that heralded the arrival of something dangerous within her. She spoke her husband’s Gallifreyan name inside a hardening voice and waited for him to look toward her. When he finally did, she lifted her chin to him. “Just what emotion are you looking for, husband? Irrational upset? Terror? Anger?” her head slowly shook. “Do you want me to scream and wail with tantrum?” Her breath drew in deep and hard, each of the exhales through her lips a spray of spittle and glimmering amber. “Do you want me to yell at you and tell you how much I am sick of this. Sick of all of it? That I want tell each and every fucking Time Lord or Lady that I have ever met to just fuck off and leave me the hell alone?”

“Rose, please…”

“No, Doctor,” she said with a laugh and a lift of her hand to tell him not to bother. “You demanded emotion. So, you will damn well stand there and take all I’ve got. You hear me?”

“Be wary,” Braxiatel warned her tenderly. “Rose. Don’t say anything you can’t take back.”

“Bit late for that,” she said with a rueful laugh. “I just told the lot of you to fuck off and that I don’t ever want to see any of you ever again, didn’t I?” She pointed to the capsules hulking along her hallway. “So you know what? Take them…” She then thumbed over her shoulder. “And them, too. Take your Gallifreyan dramatics back to bloody Gallifrey and leave me the hell alone. I’m done! Done with all of it. Done with the lack of room. Done with not bein’ able to even get a decent night sleep. Done with the constant interruptions. Done with all the ridiculous political bullshit of your people – bullshit I can’t ever hope to actually understand due to my inferior humanness and lack of interest at all in bloody politics.” She flicked her hand, firing a splatter of blood onto the Doctor’s pant leg from the tips of her fingers. “Don’t even like or understand British politics, why the hell would I enjoy the Gallifreyan version of it? Pompous and self-righteous bastards, the lot of you.”

She leaned forward to bury her face in her hands and let out a loud and frustrated growl. Her fingers curled down over her closed eyes, her nails scraping lines along her cheeks, into fists at her chin. She clenched every muscle in her body and belched out a louder sound of utter frustration that pulled up her knees and shoulders.

“That’s it, Rose,” Braxiatel urged her with a smile of support as he finally lowered himself to a crouch in front of her. “Get it out, darling. Break. We can take it.”

“You condescending arse,” she charged him with an angry sneer. “All of you! This is all your fault! All of it. Pack it up and leave. Now! Get out and leave me the hell alone!”

“My _condescending arse_ isn’t going anywhere.” He said in calm reply. He pointed his finger behind him toward his brother. “And neither is his. Nor Romana, Leela, Andred, Phiroi, or any other one of us you care about.” He reached forward to cup her cheek in his hand. “You’re stuck with all of us. Like it or not.”

“I hate you,” she growled with reply. Although her eyes were still hardened with anger, she didn’t shrug from his hand. “I mean it, Brax.”

“So many people feel that way about me that it’s really lost all impact now,” he replied with a sad smile. “And while my feelings toward you are quite beyond the opposite, my dear, I’ll accept your proclaimed hatred of me and add your name to the already rather extensive list of others, hmmm?”

“She wanted me to kill him,” Rose said in a small voice. “Tried to force me to do it. But I couldn’t. I can’t.”

“I’m sorry, who and who?” he asked with a pinch in his brow. He looked toward the now very still and unrecognizable figure on the floor. “Who was she, and who did she want you to kill?”

“Phennea,” she answered quietly. “She wanted me to kill the Doctor.”

Braxiatel let out a swear under his breath and looked to the body on the ground. He covered his hand in his mouth and shook his head. “This is bad,” he breathed out. “Very bad. You’ve killed one of Rassilon’s descendants. This won’t come without repercussions.”

“I will take that blame,” Leela affirmed. 

“We’ll _all_ take the blame,” Braxiatel corrected her. “Neither of the two of you are taking this on your own. I won’t allow that.”

“I will gladly take that blame alone, Braxiatel,” Leela warned him. “Rose and the Doctor, you and Romana. You can not be held to blame when this … this _creature_ … tried to use wizardry and hocus pocus to force a wife to kill her husband. To destroy your family.”

“Hocus-pocus?” Braxiatel asked with a creased face of incredulity and question. “What do you mean by hocus pocus?”

She looked toward the Doctor, still in a stand behind his brother. “I have seen it used before. Back on Gallifrey, when you became President. Rodan, remember her? Pretty girl. Very clever, but also very delicate.”

“You’re asking me to go way back,” the Doctor breathed out. “Several hundred years and a half dozen regenerations ago.”

“You must remember,” Leela pressed. “You did something to her, Doctor. With her eyes. You looked into her eyes and you told her that she must obey K9 and protect the key of your Lord Rassilon, and she did.”

His cheek crinkled on one side to narrow an eye. “You mean hypnosis?” His face lengthened out and he shot a concerned look down toward Rose. “Did she hypnotise you?”

“Well, she _tried_ ,” Rose murmured. “Didn’t work, though.”

“Of course it didn’t,” Braxiatel said with a huff. “You’ve got protections in place for that. I made sure of it.”

Beside him, the Doctor dropped into a crouch. It was clear that he was rattled, angry and hurt, but he held a soft focus on his wife. “So, you’re saying that she tried to hypnotise you into killing me?”

“After she tried to get a bit of information from me first,” she answered with a shrug. “Which she got none, of course. But the two of you are in some serious trouble on Gallifrey, I hope you know,” she said with warning and a flick of her finger between them.

The Doctor’s shoulders heaved just noticeably. There was a solidness in his expression and a dimple in his cheek. His voice was low and quiet. “She tried to get into your mind to force you to murder me?”

“Yeah,” she drawled out. She covered her face in one hand. “Wanted me to force you to watch as I stabbed you through each one of your remaining regenerations. Break your hearts while I stopped them beating, I think she said.” She looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “But how could I do that to you, Doctor?” She petted her chest. “This can’t beat without you. Not ever again.”

“I know, Rose.”

“Thete,” Braxiatel warned. “Shield your mate, we have an oncoming regeneration.” He pointed to Andred. “Protect your wife,” he warned him. “Based on the mess this has to counter off, this one will be destructive.” He looked to Rose with apology. “I’ll make sure everything is cleaned up and anything damaged is replaced. I swear it.” He stood up quickly and rushed around to the other side of the breakfast bar to use it as a shield.

Rose didn’t have time to get her arm up for help before the Doctor dipped low and circled his arm around her waist. He hauled her up against his chest and quickly guided them both around the breakfast counter beside Braxiatel. He spun them both, and then dropped back into a crouch with his back against the wooden counter that stood between them and Phennea’s shimmering, glowing body. Across the room, Andred shielded a remarkably pliant Leela in much the same way with cover beside the medical capsule.

“I’ve got you,” the Doctor promised Rose through his teeth as he prepared himself for the hot wash of the regeneration over their heads. “Just hold on to me, yeah?” He drew in a breath and added a tender afterthought. “Tight, and please don’t let me go.” He pressed his lips to her head and his voice was a mere breath against her hair. “Never let me go, Hearts. Please.”

Braxiatel slid a look toward his brother and winced at the forlorn expression in his widened eyes as he stared to the cabinet directly ahead of him and rocked back and forth ever so gently. The hold he had on his wife with both of his arms and his legs was tight and possessive – and in some degree desperate. 

He brought his fist to his forehead and dropped his head backward on the cabinet door against his back. He knew what was on Thete’s mind right now, and why he seemed so utterly lost. He had no idea what they were going to do after the regeneration. It terrified him to think of what would happen and how they were going to handle Phennea. Well. He had an idea, of course. He knew what _could_ be done, but it was something that violated several of the most stringent of all Gallifreyan laws. Oh, sure, he’d broken more than a bucketful of laws on Gallifrey and had even pushed this particular one to its very limit with Ace’s temples underneath his fingertips. But he didn’t know if he was capable of anything like that against a Time Lord – especially one trained by Borusa himself.

He looked toward Thete. He was trained by that Lord and even exceeded the skill wielded by the old telepathic master by the time he was in his Fourth incarnation. He was more than capable of it, but there was no way in any realm of any reality that he could count on him to do anything like that…

…There was no way he could even suggest it. Just to make the suggestion violated every one of the laws his brother had created in his own mind about it.

Three was a whoosh and a splintering crack from the other side of the counter, and he grit his teeth against the heat raging over the top of the counter.

“Someone please tell me the pies are in the fridge and not still on the counter,” he muttered through his teeth in the hope to find at least a small bit of levity inside the panic. He felt a small hand curl around his and shifted his head toward Rose, who looked at him with affection and a small smile.

“Did that before I went to bed.”

“You’re an amazing woman,” he breathed out as he lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a small kiss to her knuckles.

“And you’re my best friend,” she said softly. “I’m sorry I said…”

He hushed her gently. “It’ll take more than that to upset me.” His head shot up as the bright light of regeneration dimmed overhead. He dropped her hand and lifted to a stand, being careful to be able to drop back into a crouch if necessary. He kept his hand low and flicked his fingers to let his brother know it was safe to get back up to his feet.

The Doctor cautioned Rose to wait a moment but wasn’t overly surprised when she chose instead to stand up almost immediately beside him. The fact that she did so and immediately curled in against his side, her arms around his waist, gave him some comfort. He held his arm loosely over her shoulder in response to her affection.

The sight of what was once her small dining room made the three of them gape in shock. The beautifully crafted cottage-style solid wood table and its matching set of 6 chairs were in a splintered pile in the centre of the room. Her water cooler was on its side, gurgling with thick, large bubbles as it emptied itself out onto the floor and spread a thickly growing clear puddle across the floor. Where the water met the puddles of drying blood, the clash of fluids swirled and curled wetly together.

At the centre of the room, the new form of Phennea stood in a hunch. Her head was low, and her chest, barely covered by the shredded and bloody remains of her clothing heaved and panted as she struggled to catch her breath. Long, straight, blonde hair covered her face and shoulders, it’s length kissed at the underside of her breasts with an curled flick of the ends. It seemed an eternity before she finally flicked up her chin and let her hair flip up off her face to fall in a perfect arch around a porcelain-skinned face. Crystal blue eyes lined with thick black lashes blinked rapidly and then opened to focus around the room. Her perfectly pouted Instagram worthy lips pursed out in a kiss at the air before stretching into a smile.

“Just when I thought she couldn’t get more beautiful,” Rose muttered with a curl in her lip and a close of her arms across her chest to hide herself. “She goes from a 10 to 100 in a single regeneration.”

“It’s only skin deep,” Braxiatel reminded her quietly. “Inside she’s ugly to the bone.” He shuddered and then forced a bright smile on his face. “Well, look who showed up to my humble abode.” He walked around the counter with a wary gait in his step. “Phenneatryithdelphirassilonmas the walking definition of debauchery and ill-repute.”

Phennea looked toward him with a purr in her smile and a coy roll in her shoulder. She hummed out appreciatively. “Irving Braxiatel. The bastard son of Betrayal and dishonesty.”

He hummed a tut of disagreement. “Oh, my dear girl. If I do recall it was you who personified those traits so perfectly that your image exists within the matrix database next to the definition of both.” 

He hid his slight shudder of fear toward her steeled look toward him as he casually leaned against the edge of the capsule. She was a dangerous woman, of that he had absolutely no doubt at all, and while he, too, had his own intensive training in the violent arts, it had been a while since he’d wielded that well hidden skillset of his.

Her newly minted eyes caught his shudder, and she smirked a smile of preening. “Yes, Braxiatel. I would be very scared if I were you.”

“Don’t mistake my guardedness for fear, Phennea,” he warned her. 

“Oh, I will,” she assured him. Her eyes then shifted toward the Doctor, and the tiny blonde human that was tucked into his side. “Hello, Rose.”

The Doctor snarled. “Don’t you speak to her,” he warned. “If you want to preen and brag about how brilliant you are and how you’re not quite done yet…” his eyes darkened, as did his voice. “Then you talk to me, got it?”

Phennea snorted. “Letting the man talk on your behalf, child?”

The Doctor felt Rose’s flinch, the signal that she was about ready to launch a tirade against the woman. He locked his arm a little tighter around her, a flex of his arm that pulled her closer into his side. “You won’t get away with this, Phen,” he managed to get out before Rose could speak.

“And what do you plan to do about it?” She queried. “I’ve got nine regenerations left. Plan to exhaust all of them?”

Leela stepped out from the cabinet, her blade in her hand. There was a glint of aggression in her eye. “It would be my honour to cycle you through all of them on the Doctor’s behalf.”

Phennea held up a wary hand toward her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the shift of the white fur coat of the beast that managed to take her down. She shuddered at the growl in his lip and the sharp piercing warning in his eyes. She maintained a level of arrogant calm. “If Thete or Braxiatel want to kill me, Savage, then they can do it on their own.” She looked toward Braxiatel, and then toward the Doctor. “Which I know for a fact neither of them are even remotely capable of doing.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Brax warned.

“Interesting that you should say that,” the Doctor ground out. “Considering you tried to use my wife to murder me.”

“An attempted parlour trick,” she answered with a sigh and a roll in her eyes. “On what should have been an inferior mind.” Her eyes flicked to Braxiatel. “Who would have known that big brother installed a little bit of Time Lord software in there.” There was a chuckle in her voice. “Might want to look what other part of her your brother’s gotten into, Thete. He seems awfully fond of her in a more than brotherly way.”

“How dare you,” the Doctor snarled as he walked around the counter and made a stiff-shouldered approach. 

“Don’t let her get to you,” Braxiatel said with a sigh. “She’s looking for a rise out of you.”

“Aren’t I just?” she purred. “Was once very good at that, wasn’t I, Thete?”

“That was a very long time ago,” he countered with a sneer.

“Anyway,” she said with a dismissive sigh and a roll in her eyes. “What a predicament we’ve found ourselves in, then.” She looked between them. “Between a rock and a hard place, aren’t you? So many choices of what to do from here – and not one of them benefits you in any way at all.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Braxiatel said with a huff.

She slouched to one side and lifted her fingers to count off their options. “You can try to cycle me through my remaining regenerations. But it will trigger a warning in the Matrix, which will head to my Grandfather.” She shot him a glare. “And another one of me will almost immediately be dispatched to finish what I started, from the very location in which my last incarnation expired.” She looked up. “Which is right here. Oh, curse the Matrix and it’s rather brilliant temporal search capabilities.”

Braxiatel swallowed hard. He couldn’t argue with that. The Doctor stood still; his arms folded across his chest.

Phennea looked between the two of them. “You can try to keep me caged, but quite frankly, I am rather brilliant at escape.” She blinked slowly. “And you’ll spend your remaining moments with the constant fear of my appearing at the end of your bed, in your shower … in your nightmares.”

“You’re already there,” the Doctor muttered.

“Nightmares, or your more wanton dreams, Thete?” He laughed at his cold look then pressed the length of her finger against her lips. “Shhh. I know. Your mate’s here and listening. Let’s let her believe that the only one who features in your dreams of mating is her.”

“It wouldn’t be a lie,” he breathed out.

“Of course not,” she purred. “Option number 3: that you kick me out of here, exile me from this house of horrors and simply let me go.” Her brows crashed together. “Dangerous of you to do that, of course. Now that I know where you are, and where all of these innocent people are. I’d report back to Lord Rassilon the moment I got out of here.”

Quite obviously proud of herself and the complete lack of workable options that the Doctor and Braxiatel had to work with, she smoothed down her hair and levered the younger of the two men with a dangerously aggressive look. “Which leads us to option number four of the only choices at your disposal. You hand over your mate. Without further argument. I take her back to Gallifrey with me.” She angled her chin upward to look at the Doctor with an almost bored expression. “Maybe I’ll let both of you live, let you keep your refuges safe. I’ll tell Rassilon that arrangements were made between us. He’s an honourable man, he’d abide by our … _agreement_.”

“You’re not getting her,” the Doctor warned her darkly. “You will have to kill me, cycle through every regeneration I have left, to get anywhere near her.”

“A challenge I’m willing to take on.”

Leela stepped forward. There was a sneer in her lip. “Then you will have to take me. I will not be as easy a target as the Doctor.”

“Thanks, Leela,” he said with a cough.

“It is true,” she said simply. “I will not lie to make you feel a better man, Doctor. You are not a hunter, nor are you a warrior.”

“So, _Doctor_ ,” Phennea muttered with disdain on his name. “Just what are we going to do? Your wife or your _people_?”

Rose walked around the counter. “Take me,” she demanded urgently, going so far as to hold her wrists out as though waiting to be cuffed. “I’ll surrender myself. Just don’t hurt the Doctor or Brax, and please keep these people safe. My life for theirs.”

Her name was sharply called by three people.

“I have to,” she said with light fear in her tone. “What choice do we have?”

“Oh aren’t you just a precious, brave little thing,” Phennea teased.

“We have choices,” the Doctor argued. He put his hands on her arms and looked into her face with an expression of pleading. “I won’t let you do this. There are other things that can be done that don’t involve me losing you.”

“Like what?” she asked him with her brows high but crinkled together with pain. “I heard her, Doctor. She’s right, there is no other way to do this. The only thing that saves you, Brax, and all these people, is me going with her.” She shuddered an inhale. “My life for theirs, Doctor. It’s a good and honourable way to go, yeah? Much better than boring old age.”

“No,” he said sharply.

“You don’t have a choice in it,” she corrected him. “My life, my decision.”

“My _wife_ ,” he snarled. “Is _my_ life. Which makes it my decision as well.” He growled an expression of frustration toward her. “And I won’t let you do this.”

Rose lifted her arm and circled it over the back of his neck. She pulled his face down to hers. “Then it’s up to you to come rescue me, then, isn’t it?” she whispered as she claimed his mouth with hers. She opened and deepened the connection immediately, fearing that this would be time she would ever be able to hold him like this ever again. Her fear and her upset filtered through their connection, and the Doctor pulled back from the kiss with a gasp.

“No,” he breathed out. “Absolutely not. I won’t let you do this.” He breathed hard in and out through his nose and held her upper arms with a tight hold. There was a shake in his hands and his shoulders. “I won’t put you in the hands of Rassilon to become his little experiment.”

“Come on, Thete,” Phennea ordered him. “Hand her over, and while you’re at it, I need one of your capsules as well. I’m thinking Brax’s old girl might work best.”

“No chance in hell,” Braxiatel growled. He moved toward his brother and stood facing both he and Rose with his back toward Phennea. “There is one more choice,” he breathed out quietly.

“I know,” the Doctor answered him.

“I can’t,” Braxiatel warned him. “I don’t have the…”

“I know,” the Doctor repeated through his teeth.

“Your mate,” he pressed. “Your children’s mother. The beat of the hearts inside your chest.” He watched the slowly heaving chest of the Doctor as anger rose within the man. “You’ve just gotten her back after almost five centuries, Thete. Your _wife_. And you just want to let her hand herself over to _Rassilon_?”

The Doctor fired his brother a hard stare.

“If it was Romana,” he kept on. “I wouldn’t even hesitate. My life, my morals, my everything, I’d give up for her. Because I know without Romana at my side, my hearts would cease to function. I’d rather be dead.” He looked him up and down with dark challenge in his eyes. “As the devoted, besotted mate of any woman would. Or are you going to admit that maybe your hearts don’t beat for her in the way they should, brother?”

His eyes flashed angrily, and he thrust his arms forward to clutch fistfuls of his brother’s shirt in his hands. With a hard forward shove, he walked Braxiatel toward the medical capsule walls. There was a curl of fury in his lip. “How dare you suggest that my love for my wife is anything less than it is,” he charged him. “My hearts and my soul are within her.”

“Then prove it,” he snarled in reply. “Or don’t you think she’s worth it?”

The Doctor kept hold of Braxiatel’s shirt but dropped his head low between his tensed and locked arms with defeat. He let out a furious and frustrated yell as he pulled hard on Brax’s shirt and then shoved a hard thrust of both fists forward to shove the man away from him. He spun on his heel and stalked toward Phennea. There was a glint of determination in his eyes and a curl of disgust on his lip – although whether the disgust was toward her, himself, or the both of them, only he knew for sure.

“Forgive me,” he snarled.

“For what?” she asked him hotly.

“Not you,” he growled as his hands snapped up and he took a hard hold of her head. “My _wife.”_ His eyes slammed shut as his thumbs dug hard into her temples. He flared his mind wide open against hers and forced himself into a mind that was weak and still recovering from regeneration.

Rose gasped with horror at the scene before her. The Doctor was in a hunch over Phennea’s slowly collapsing figure. Her eyes were blown wide, her mouth gaped, as she drew out a long cry against the Doctor’s telepathic connection. She yelled to him to stop and tried to rush forward to knock them apart, but was stopped by the firm press of Braxiatel’s palm against her breastbone.

“Don’t,” he warned her with a shake in his head. “It’s done now. Leave him.”

“It’s not done,” she argued. Phennea was now on her knees in front of the Time Lord who still towered over her, his hands still clutching tight hat her head. She looked with desperation toward the other Time Lord. “Andred!” she cried out. “You have to stop him!”

“It’s the only way,” he said with a shake in his head. “If it was Leela, I’d do the same thing.”

“How can you…?”

“I would,” he vowed with a fired look in her direction. “I’d much rather help him than stop him. There’s far too much at stake here.”

“Andred's right,” Braxiatel agreed. 

“Doctor!” she cried out as she struggled to get past Braxiatel. “Stop this. You can’t. This isn’t _you_!”

“Actually,” Braxiatel corrected her gently as he wrapped his arms around her to try and keep her in place. “It is.” He swayed just a bit with a stagger against her struggling. “It’s all of us, Rose. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same to protect him.”

Her struggling shifted to defeated, light stomping, and she held at Braxiatel’s arms that were looped around her waist and leaned back against his chest. “He’s going to kill her.”

“No, he won’t,” he assured against her ear. “He’s just rearranging a few things, deleting a few entries. Pressing reset.” He panted out and shuddered. “Killing her is a line not even Thete’ll cross.” He huffed out a shaking breath. “Rassilon, on the other hand…”

Rose relaxed against Braxiatel’s hold and whimpered out her husband’s name in pleading. She still held at his wrists with a tight grasp but was done with struggling and fighting. What was happening was happening, and all she could do was wait until it was over and hopefully support the Doctor once it dawned on him what he was driven to do.

Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity, the Doctor inhaled a deep gasp and released Phennea’s head. She swayed on her knees but didn’t fall or collapse in any way. More than anything she seemed disorientated and confused than truly injured in any way.

The Doctor staggered backward a few steps and, when his bare foot met with a splintered chunk of wood, stumbled backward onto his knee. His breaths were a series of deep gulps and swallows that drove him to his hands and knees. His stomach contracted with dry retches against the tile beneath him.

Braxiatel released Rose and she ran quickly toward where the Doctor was still heaving air toward the ground and struggling to draw in a breath. She wrapped an arm across his shoulder and underneath his head, drawing his face up to hers.

“I’m sorry,” he panted out as he sought focus on her face. There were tears in his eyes and he looked down at his hands with a wince. “I had no other choice.”

“I know,” she assured him quietly. She shifted to seat herself in a straddle over his knees and tightly wrapped her arms around his head, holding his forehead in between her breasts. His arms snapped tightly around her chest.

“Thete,” Braxiatel called emotionlessly from the capsule. 

The Doctor turned his head and looked underneath Rose’s arm toward his brother. “She’s harmless to us now,” he assured him with a nod of his head. He moved his head back in between Rose’s breasts and slumped against her. “She may even be able to be of help when she recovers.”

Braxiatel gave him a firm nod. “I’ll call Narvin,” he said with a sniff out. “Let him know what happened. See if he can provide interference until we can get access to her login protocols and take over where she left off.”

“You do that,” the Doctor breathed inaudibly against his wife’s chest. “You do that.”

Rose looked down at the top of his head. With a shift of her arms, she managed to get her fingers underneath his chin. “Look at me,” she pleaded with him as she gently tried to lift his chin.

He looked upward and exhaled a long breath that shuddered out through his mouth. “My hearts,” he whispered with a shudder, unable to finish the phrasing right now, but knowing she understood.

Rose stood up slowly and held her hand down to help him to his feet. “Come with me,” she requested softly.

He took her hand but didn’t use the strength of her to lift him to his feet. He managed to do that on his own. “Where?”

“To the TARDIS,” she answered him with a whisper. “There’s something the both of us need, and we can’t get that here.”

“Good idea,” Braxiatel said with a flick of his hand to scoot them away. “Clean yourselves up.” He looked to Leela. “And you, too. Bathroom’s upstairs, towel’s on the rack.”

He looked around the kitchen, and the bloodied wolf, and let out a long sigh. Hell, there was a lot to be done, and very little time to do it in. “By the robe of Omega. We’ve got one hell of a mess to clean up and only two hours before the children wake – Looks like I’ll have to wake up a residence capsule, see if we get someone to clean this mess up.” 

~~oooOOOooo~~


	21. Moody

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax is in a very bad mood that not even pie will fix

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This starts off light. Sorry, but I needed to write a little bit of fluff levity for a bit after my last couple of days...
> 
> It doesn't exactly end as lightly.
> 
> I've been wanting to get to this bit for a week now ... so I'm a little excited. And for those of you who feel that Rose is forgetting that she's got precious bundles at home that she needs to think about before doing crazy stuff .. I totally agree with you. But I really need her here, and I was really struggling to figure out how to get her there. Forgive her that for this chapter, okay? Not her fault -- this time it's mine. :)
> 
> I hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

The blue TARDIS doors opened with a soft creak and whine, but the occupants of the old time ship didn’t immediately exit. A long-fingered hand surrounded by blue cuffs embellished with rusted red thin pinstripes did appear to clutch lightly at the frame, but it disappeared just as quickly. There was a giggle, and then a sigh, and a feminine hand appeared instead. The large blue Gallifreyan diamond that graced the fourth finger glittered in the light of the hallway with the curling movement of her hand around the frame as Rose slowly tried to move through the doorway. While walking through a door of any kind was not ordinarily a problematic task, right now she had the hurdle of an over-affectionate Time Lord hindering her progress.

In a somewhat desperate attempt to erase the horrors of Phennea’s mind – what he saw in there – the Doctor was refusing to relinquish the physical contact he’d achieved with his wife when she’d dragged him into the shower nearly an hour prior. They hadn’t made love – neither of them were in a good place to do that right now – but they had shared a tender and intensely intimate moment of affection underneath suds and water with their minds wide open to each other. And for him, that was just as emotionally pleasurable and satisfying as any moment spent as one underneath the sheets. Right now, he was unable to surrender any form of skin to skin contact with her. So, as they walked he alternated between pressing his forehead against hers and sucking against her lips.

Yes, it was an awkward trek to take from the bathroom and toward the doors of the TARDIS that spanned a good fifteen minutes, but he was absolutely okay with that. The more time spent together, the better.

“Doctor,” she breathed out against his searching mouth as he pressed them both up against the doorframe of his ship. “We really should settle this down now, yeah?”

“Not yet,” he breathed with a stroke of his fingertips down along her cheek. “I’m not quite ready. Still need you inside my mind.”

She hummed into a sigh and acquiesced to his affection for a moment longer, wondering just as what point he’d say sod it and drag the both of them back inside to fire the both of them up completely.

“If the two of you don’t mind,” Braxiatel growled hotly as he passed. “There are some rather emotionally repressed Time Lords being made to feel extremely uncomfortable by this display.”

“You being one, I guess,” the Doctor said with a smirk toward the back of his brother’s retreating form.

“Hardly repressed,” Braxiatel shot over his shoulder. “But very busy.” He didn’t look back at the pair, but he thrust a hand to gesture toward the front of the house. “You’re needed, Thete. Do the universe a favour and join them.”

The Doctor finally released his wife and looked to his brother, who was now in an angry lean over the breakfast counter. “And you?”

Braxiatel looked toward his brother with a furious expression as he used a fork to pull across a plate with a wedge of pie on it. “If I have to spend another second with that group, I’ll punch the lot of them.”

“Ahh,” he breathed with a rub at the back of his neck. “It’s going to be another one of those days, then. _Brilliant_.” He looked to the group of people at the table. “Where’s Romana? They generally behave with her.”

“School run,” he answered. “Whatever the two of you were up to in there took much longer than you think it did. Romana chose not to interrupt and insisted she take the children to school.” He lifted his head and looked up at the kitchen window. “Apparently she doesn’t trust my driving skills enough to allow me to do it.”

“I’m in agreement with her,” the Doctor muttered with a shrug. “I’m still in recovery from our last outing.”

“When Brax has the children with him, he’s is a very different driver,” Rose defended with a smile. “I trust him completely.” She petted the Doctor’s chest. “Now, go referee the melee of your people. I’ll make some tea.”

He kissed her gently on the cheek and vowed a soft recital of his affection toward her, then thrust his hands into his pockets, plastered a smile on his face and walked toward the table to join the others.

Rose exhaled a breath to watch her husband’s smile shift toward serious admonishment. She shook her head with a light smile and padded on bare feet into her kitchen. She half expected it to still be a disaster-zone, but was pleasantly surprised to see it almost sparkling clean. If it wasn’t for the missing glass panels in the door, the dining set gone, she’d never have guessed it was a blood bath only a couple of hours ago.

“Wow,” she breathed out with appreciation as she stepped up beside Braxiatel and leaned backward on the counter, her elbows behind her to help with her lean. “It looks incredible in here.”

“Yeah,” he muttered as he stabbed his fork aimlessly into the pie wedge.

Rose pursed her lips. A one-syllable drawl of an answer from Braxiatel was perhaps the rarest occurrence in the entire universe. She turned her head to look down her shoulder at him. “You okay?”

His lips curled upward. “Perfectly fine,” he snipped out with a rather hard poke at the pie with his fork.

Rose looked down to the pie, and the rather abused state of it, and noticed that he had yet to take an actual bite of it. Usually he’d have the whole thing scarfed down in about three minutes and would be looking for another slice. She looked back at him. “You sure?”

“Certain of it,” he replied darkly.

Rose watched the wary approach of Carein, no doubt looking for a word with him, and held her hand up with a slight shake of her head. She nodded when the young woman pointed toward a note pad and held up a pen. Carein set it down on a temporary table fashioned by medical crates and walked away.

Rose inhaled a deep breath and lifted herself out of her lean. “Well, Brax. If you’re in such a good mood, you won’t mind me doing this, then, will you?”

“Do what?”

Rose slid in between the counter and Braxiatel with practiced ease. She wrapped her arms around his chest and pulled him tight to her, readying for the struggle of him to pull away. He wasn’t typically a cuddler, but when she wanted to pull him from a mood, it was usually the best method to do so. “I need a cuddle,” she said with a growling sound.

As expected, he writhed for escape. “Then go get one from Thete. I’m quite sure he’ll oblige your desire.”

“Nope,” she said through her teeth as she held on tight. “Need a Brax cuddle.”

He groaned out with annoyance. “I don’t cuddle.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I do not,” he argued. “Now if you don’t mind, release me from your grasp and let me eat my pie in peace.”

“If you were actually eatin’ it, then I might,” she replied, refusing to let him go. “And as you seem more interested in murderin’ it than eating it, and are obviously in a foul mood, I’m going to keep cuddling you until you either cheer up or shove me away.”

He dropped the fork loudly to the countertop and then huffed out a defeated sound. His arms came around her shoulders and he dropped his chin onto her head. “I am so furious with you right now,” he managed after a moment.

“So’s the Doctor,” she said with a sigh. “Though he won’t admit it, or even tell me why. But I reckon I have a fair idea of it.”

“You gave up on us,” he said with a soft voice that was still quite hard. “You lost faith in our ability to protect you.”

“I didn’t,” she corrected him softly. “But I knew you both needed a bit of a push to get yourselves over that line. The Doctor. You. Neither of you’d let me give myself up like that without a fight. I knew that.”

“And if we couldn’t, Rose? What then?” he asked her with a tightening of his arms around her shoulders. “It’d destroy Thete, and then he’d run off half cocked to Gallifrey, which then forces me to run after him to make sure he doesn’t get himself killed.”

“Not that you care about me or anythin’,” she said with a forced sigh. “Just Thete.”

“That’s a lie and you know it,” he breathed out. He drew in a deep breath. “I’m trying to figure out how to help you, Rose. I am.” He huffed. “But with everything the way it is right now, with danger to all of us, I can’t come up with a plan right now that doesn’t make everything worse.”

She lifted her head to look up into his face. “Plan for what?”

“To give you back your room,” he answered softly. “Give you back your life.”

She slouched with regret and moaned as she shuffled to pull away from him. This time she found herself trapped by _his_ hold. “Brax. About what I said. I didn’t mean it. I was just frustrated and lashing out.”

“No, you weren’t,” he countered. “And I don’t blame you for it. We intruded on you in the worst possible way without thinking about what effect it would truly have on you and the children.” He breathed out. “I really didn’t think it through beyond helping… well…”

“And I would never have said no,” Rose assured him. “Even knowing what I do now, I still wouldn’t say no.” She looked back up at his face, only able to see his chin and up into his nostrils as he wasn’t looking down at her. “Look at me, Brax.”

He lowered his face to hers.

“I can deal with it, yeah?” she assured him. “Sure, there are moments when I find myself upset and frustrated. But that’s life, isn’t it?”

“It shouldn’t be,” he said softly. “Not for you.”

She sighed in deeply. “It always seems that when one of the two of you say something specific to me like that, it always goes the opposite way.” She looked toward the hallway. “Not to _you_ , he says about dumping me off like the rest of them, then leaves me alone on a spaceship five thousand years into the future.” She looked up at him. “Not for _you_ , you say, and I end up inconvenienced…” She wriggled out of his hold. “Moving forward, don’t either of you say anything like that, it always ends up bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

She waved him off. “Nah, don’t be. Just my luck, yeah?”

He finally gave up on the pie and pushed it forward on the counter. “Rose. If I may. Can we talk?”

“Thought we already were,” she said with her brows seated high on her forehead.

“I mean _really_ talk,” he clarified with a light wince in his face. “There’s…” he drew in a breath. “There’s something that I really need to discuss with you.”

She looked at him with a pinch of suspicion in her eye. The discomfort level shown in his features was crystal clear. “You’re not going to tell me that you’re in love with me and so we need to run away from our mates, or anything like that, are you?”

“Good heavens no,” he barked with shock and horror on his face. “Why would you think something so preposterous?”

“Well,” she said with enough of a feigned look of hurt that it would be worthy of an Oscar. “Make a girl feel good, why don’t ya?”

“With all due respect to the amazing woman that you are,” he began with a cough. “My hearts very much belong in Romana’s hands. I am her devoted and loyal mate and I will be until the day I die.” The look of absolute dismay on his face was almost amusing with its intensity. “Have I, perhaps, been too generous with my affections toward you? Or as you say _flirted_ too much to give you the wrong idea? You humans, you’re a remarkably difficult species to properly interpret, and I have been doing my very best to behave with you as I believed was considered acceptable behaviour for your kind.” He panted out a hurried breath. “If I have given you any indication that my affections for you are any more than … well … than is acceptable...”

Rose spit out a laugh at his horror. She petted her hand against his chest and stooped forward to continue her laugh. “Oh, Brax. Your absolute horror at this has just made my entire year. I could live off your expression alone for the rest of my life to look back and have a laugh.” She stood back up, leaning backward to look at him through tear-filled eyes of mirth. “Of course, I know you don’t fancy me like that. Aside from the fact that I have nowhere near the class and gorgeousness of Romana, I’m also human. Very human. Definitely not your type even if Romana wasn’t a part of your life.”

“You’re also mated to my brother,” he said slowly. “Which is – I apologise – off putting all on its own.”

“But I make good pie,” she offered with a smile.

He stretched his lips in a smile to match hers. “Well. That is a positive trait that can just make one ignore the human aspect of your biology.” He winced just slightly. “But there is still that part of you that thinks that Thete is a worthy mate for you.”

“We can argue your worthiness to Romana, too, you know.”

“Best we don’t,” he said with a sigh. “At least not within earshot of my beloved, lest she agree and decide she doesn’t want my hearts anymore.”

“Thought she was stuck with you now?”

He nodded and then winked. “I’m not the only one who doesn’t think it all through.”

“So anyway,’ Rose sang out as she leaned around him to retrieve the plate he’d abandoned. She held it to her chest and forked a big mouthful of it. “What’dya want to talk about?”

“That’s my pie,” he said flatly.

“Nope,” she countered with a shake in her head as she took another mouthful. “You rejected it. Mine now.” She dropped her head back and let out a long moan. “And it’s so good.”

“That’s the last slice, you know.” He gestured to the living room. “That lot got into the rest of it. Phiroi said that you’d told him I wasn’t allowed to have any, that I had to watch them eat it…”

“He actually went with it?” she barked out with a laugh. “Oh! That’s brilliant.” She thumbed a crumb from the side of her mouth. “Is that why you were in a mood, then?”

He rolled his eyes. “No. My _mood_ , as you call it, was definitely not pie-related. More a combination of that bunch of no-brains in there arguing nonsensically.” He pulled up his sleeve to display a bandage on his arm. “Getting bitten by a feral beast who didn’t want a bath…”

“Oh, shit!” she called out with shock. “I-I’m so sorry. How bad is it?”

“Bad enough,” he answered with a shrug as he pulled down his sleeve. “Then there’s not being able to reach Narvin to advise him about last evening. On top of that my own worries about your current state of mental health and how I can possibly help you…”

“Lack of sleep, too, yeah?”

“That too,” he admitted. He exhaled and rubbed at his brow. “I also had a few things I wanted to do – off planet – that I can’t get to right now. And I really don’t like it when my plans have to change for other things.”

“Why not?”

He frowned at her. “Why not? Because when I make plans, I like to stick to them. Despite the fact that I have a time machine, there are still things that have a rather delicate time sensitivity to them that a time ship cannot help with.”

She tilted her head at him. “If you left _now_ , would it be too late?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Great,” she said with a beaming grin. “Then let’s go!”

A look of worry creased his features. “I’m sorry, do you think you’re invited?”

“More like I’m inviting myself,” she said with a shrug as she put the empty plate onto the breakfast counter. She sucked the sticky tip of her thumb with a loud smacking sound, then wiped her hands on the hips of her yoga pants. “God knows I could do with a quick trip out of here.”

“Thete could take you on a trip,” he offered. “I’m sure he’d jump at the chance.”

“The last time we did that, he ended up bringing home an ex-girlfriend who tried to kill him and take me back to Gallifrey to become Rassilon’s experiment.” She looked to the side of her at the almost empty dining area of her home. “Dread to think what he’ll bring home next.”

He pursed his lips. “That’s a good point.” His nose screwed up as he seemed to actually consider the idea. With a shake of his head he exhaled. “But no, Rose. As much as I would enjoy proving to you that I am a far better capsule pilot that my brother. Where I intend on going isn’t exactly safe for you.”

“Again,” she ventured carefully. “I’ve done extensive travel with the Doctor – and there are very few places he’s taken me that can be considered safe. Downright dangerous, mostly.”

He looked up to the living room. “He’d get very angry at me if I agree to take you anywhere.”

She rolled her eyes with a sigh and a smile. “Doesn’t that just make it that much more enticing?” Her eyes flicked back to his. “There’s pie in it if you do. I’ll make you a special batch that no one else can eat.”

“I will not be bought by pie,” he growled.

“I’ve created a Magenta/Magnolia flavour combination that will blow your mind,” she offered slyly. “And just so you know – the TARDIS has both trees in her belly full of fruit.” She puckered her lips and slouched with a bounce in her shoulders. “Please just get me out of here for a while?”

He pressed his lips together and looked toward his capsule. He then looked to the living room, where he could hear the raised voices of further arguing. He parted his lips and breathed out as he snatched her hand in his. “Fine. This time only, okay?” he said as he tugged her toward his capsule. “We can dematerialise and materialise again before any of them even know we’ve gone. Set return for less than thirty seconds.”

“So, we’re really doing this?” she asked excitedly. “I should let the Doctor know. Gimme a mo, yeah?”

“I’ve got it,” he answered with a press of his hand on the door of his capsule. He took a quick look at the table, meeting eyes with his brother. He smiled and pointed down to Rose’s head as she curled around him to clamour onboard. “ _Five minutes_ ,” he mouthed and held up a hand with all fingers outstretched to indicate that number. 

The Doctor gave him a curious and perplexed expression and mouthed: _what_?”

Braxiatel replied with a dramatic roll of his eyes and thumbed into the ship. With his eyes still in an upward roll, he then made a puppet motion with his hand: _Talk talk talk_

The Doctor’s mouth stretched in an expression of understanding and he nodded toward his brother. He held up his hand with only four fingers up, indicating five was too high a number.

Braxiatel returned the gesture with one that was less than savoury on their home planet, and was rewarded with a chuckle from the table for his efforts.

He stepped aboard the capsule and closed the door behind him. He rubbed his hands together with a loud clap and strode quickly along the command deck toward the console. “Right, my dear,” he breathed to his ship. “And Rose,” he added as an afterthought. He looked up to the monitor. “So. Just what coordinates did my younger self enter into my nav-system?”

Rose leaned around the central column to look at Braxiatel with a rise in her brow. “Your _younger_ self?”

“Yes,” he answered as he pulled up the coordinates and narrowed his eyes at the information. “You might remember me back then, Rose. Tall. Handsome. Distinguished. Well-tailored pinstriped 3-piece suits.”

“Last you, yeah,” she breathed out. “Sexy in that older-guy kind of way.”

“I’m flattered, of course,” he said with a smile as he flipped up the dematerialisation lever. 

“Ehm,” she breathed out slowly. “So why are you and your younger self…”

“Really best you don’t ask,” he advised her. “And please: don’t tell Romana.”

“Not making that promise,” she said with a shake in her head. “Love you, Brax, but I’m not lying for you.”

“No. I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“So where are we going, anyway?”

He looked up to the monitor. “Estrail, he answered with a light tilt in his head. “In the Bhagzar Galaxy… Why would we be going there?”

“Your younger self gave you the coordinates,” Rose offered. “So shouldn’t you already know?”

“No,” he breathed out without looking at her. “We put up memory blocks as standard practice after each time we meet or communicate,” he answered distractedly. “Why Estrail? That’s a peaceful planet.”

“Each time? Standard practice?” She widened her eyes. “Sounds like this isn’t the first time, then.”

“No, it isn’t,” he answered with distraction still lacing his tone. His lips pursed curiously off to one side and at a blinking green light on the console, leaned forward to begin materialisation procedures. His eyes were still on the screen ahead of him, and the swirling circular words of his people. “This really makes no sense. What could Rassilon possibly want with this planet?”

Rose’s eyes widened at the mention of the word Rassilon. “Brax? Just where are we going, and should I be scared?”

“Want me to take you home?” he asked with a look. 

“Will you come back if I go home?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Then no. Don’t take me home.” She inhaled, gave him a smile and reached out to take his hand. “Better with two, yeah?”

“It would be much better with a gun, but yes. I suppose two is better than one.” He looked up as the rotor column silenced. “Looks like we’re here. You can stay put if you like. I’m just stepping out for a quick look.”

“I’m coming with,” she said firmly. “Just in case.”

“Fine.” He walked to the door and opened a cabinet at the side. From within he pulled out a black pair of staser guns. He tucked one into the back waistband of his trousers and handed the other one to Rose. “Here. Just in case.”

She looked at the weapon a moment, and then held it with both hands, like she always saw them do on the TV. Having never actually fired a gun before, she tucked in beside Braxiatel as they stepped out of the capsule. “Brax. I don’t know how to use one of these.”

“Good thing for you I’m a good shot,” he assured her. “There was only one other person on Gallifrey who was a better shot than me.” He swallowed. “And she’s gone now.”

“Maybe we should call in the Doctor,” she offered somewhat fearfully as she followed behind him. “If you think it’s so dangerous that we need guns. He’ll come; I know he will.”

“You can wait in the capsule if you like,” he offered. He shook his head with a wince, as though discomforted with a headache or dizziness. “But I’m here now, and I do need to take a look around.”

She noted the wince in his face and the shaking of his head as though he was trying to clear his senses. “Are you okay?”

“I feel like I’m walking through a fog,” he answered her quietly. “Like each step I take takes me deeper into … I don’t know … like molasses.” He looked at her. “Are you okay?”

“Perfectly fine,” she breathed out. “I’m not feeling what you are.”

He breathed out a sound of dawning understanding. “Ahhh. It’s affecting my telepathic receptors, then.” He huffed out. “Nice.”

“Don’t think it’s _nice_ ,” she countered. “Things getting inside your head aren’t _nice_.”

They walked in silence for a moment, Rose a half step behind Braxiatel and watching the path behind them. She grew more uncomfortable as his capsule grew smaller across the distance between them. She touched her hand to Braxiatel’s arm for comfort, and to get his attention.

“What is it you’re looking for?”

“I’m really not all that sure,” he answered her. “There are rumours that Rassilon set up a station here of a rather nefarious nature. The timelines in this region have become twisted and unstable, and no Time Lord has been able to get close to try and investigate the cause.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. 

“That’s gotto be hard for you to say,” she managed out with a light laugh. “Better check for the four horses, an apocalypse is on route.”

“You’ll be okay,” he assured her, understanding her need for a bit of levity. He lowered his head to shake it free of cobwebs, then lifted it again. “I promise you that I’ll get you home safe.”

“I trust you,” she whispered with a look up and around them. “You said that you know the place, estise?”

“Estrail,” he corrected her. “The sixth planet of its solar system. Home to the Estralians…”

“Australians?”

“No,” he answered with a laugh. “Not quite warm enough for them here. Summer lasts the equivalent of one month on Earth. The rest of the year it’s bitterly cold. So, therefore, the chances of being able to produce the crops to brew their beer are fairly low.”

“Yeah, don’t think for a second they wouldn’t work it out, though,” she mused. “The Southern Mountaineers worked with what they found back at the house and did okay.”

“That’s good old fashioned Gallifreyan ingenuity for you,” he said with a smirk. “Can’t hold a good distiller down.” He held his hand up and lowered into a crouch beside a large boulder overlooking the gully below. One side of his face creased hard into a wince of discomfort and he once again shook his head. He watched out of the corner of his eye as Rose lowered into a crouch beside him. “You can’t feel that at all, Rose? The buzzing, foggy sensation in your head?”

“Not at all,” she answered with a lift of her head to look down below. “Must be my inferior brain – the telepathic brain waves think it’s not worth the bother. So. What’s down there?”

He leaned his arm on the rock and narrowed his eyes at her. “I really wish you’d stop saying that about yourself, Rose.” At her questioning hum he let out a breath. “There is nothing inferior about you.”

Her eyes slid toward his. “Compared to you guys, I am, Brax.”

“Compared to all of us? Rose, you are superior in so many ways.”

“I love you too,” she joked. She pointed below. “Now come on, tell me. What’s down there?”

He drew in a deep breath and then tasted the air around them with a swipe of the very tip of his tongue across his lip. “Lindos,” he breathed out curiously. “Artron.” 

“You mean there’s a Time Lord down there that’s hurt?” she asked with a gasp. “Then we have to help them!”

He shook his head and exhaled a huff. “That’s a drop of several hundred feet, Rose. I shouldn’t be able to smell or taste anything – even if several Time Lords were regenerating at the same time.” He looked around him. “But it’s everywhere. The air is absolutely saturated with it.”

“But we can handle it, yeah?” She blinked hopefully to him. “Just like home, right? During the war. We were always bathed in the stuff.”

“Yeah,” he drawled.

“And we’re okay, right? No harm done.” She jutted her chin toward the edge. “We should check it out. If you’ve got people down there in pain and need of help, then we should help them.” She grabbed his hand. “Come on. Let’s go.”

His hand tightened around hers. “You stay close to me at all times, Rose. No matter what, I want you in my sights.”

“Of course.”

“I mean it,” he said with a growl. “Because you’re my responsibility now, and nothing is going to happen to you on my watch.”

“Got it,” she said with a beaming grin. “Look at you all protective big brother.”

“Self preservation, really,” he huffed out as he rose to his full height and held out his hand to her. “Thete’s got a bit of a streak in him, and if you got hurt while with me…” He shuddered. “I’ve dealt with one of him trying to kill me in the past, have no desire to face that again.”

“A story you need to share,” she breezed out as she stepped close to him, her hand inside his. 

They walked together along a path that curled around the edge of the cliff. When it turned to move inside the pit, the pair of them stood on the edge in wait. 

“Let me test the ground,” Braxiatel offered quietly. “Make sure it’s stable and we both won’t tumble in.”

He stepped to the edge and looked down into the darkness below. He tilted his head to listen to a softly howling wind below them. Curiosity shifted to worry, and then to disbelief. Pain etched his features and he shook his head. “Oh, by the light of Omega’s power, please no.”

“What’s wrong?” Rose asked him with a hurried, worried voice.

He fell to his knees at the edge of the pit. “This is just cruel,” he answered her with an agonised voice. “Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands…” His horrified eyes shifted to Rose. “Time Lords. I can hear every single one of their voices, Rose. All of them. All at once.”

Her voice lowered toward a grave concern. “Brax?”

His hands flew up to the sides of his head. “The whole lot of them, Rose. All at once. They’re screaming.” He swayed on his knees and then leaned forward over his thighs. His hands were tight over his ears, and tight against his temples. “Screaming inside my mind.” He threw himself forward onto his hands and knees, the only thing holding him up from falling over the edge into the pit was the clutch of one hand in the dirt at its edge. The other hand was on his head, his hair held in a tight fist. “I can’t get them out of my head,” he cried desperately. He lifted his chin and let out a cry of pain that howled across the pit in front of him.

~~oooOOOooo~~


	22. A Single heartbeat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose has to get Braxiatel back to his capsule. Romana needs to answer her phone!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mental note: Don't listen to Jeff Wayne's version of War of the Worlds while writing (effing brilliant though it is)... it really does mess up the flow a bit. too many times over this past two hours I've paused to just listen.... 
> 
> Anyway: My Friday offering that I will hope will be able to cover you across the weekend until I can return in a couple of days to keep going.
> 
> One thing that I've determined I really like about holographic communications is that you can put everyone in the same room at once -- even when they do happen to be millions of miles apart. Gawd, that makes it so much easier to write.
> 
> There is one section here that I know will roll some eyes and have people huff and say "Really? Again?" My response is, yeah. Really AND again... I quite like my running themes, and this just might end up one of them....
> 
> No, not really... it was just something that felt like it worked. Couldn't think of anything else, so ran with what I know. HA!
> 
> I really hope you enjoy. I also hope I managed at least one gasp or snicker for you in this chapter. Next chapter will be fuuuuuuuuun to write, can't wait!

~~oooOOOooo~~

Rose Tyler wasn’t often terrified. She had been fairly well desensitised to it as a youngster on the Estates, sneaking in horror movie showings when her mum was out, or sneaking into to R-rated showings with Mickey of Shareen. Travelling with the Doctor had only further desensitised her to what lurked in the shadows. In fact, thinking back, she couldn’t remember the last time she truly felt a sense of fear – at least not since the day she’d stumbled into the wrong TARDIS and had her hand and her heart taken by the man within…

…But now? Right now, at this very moment, Rose Tyler had to admit to herself that she was scared. No, worse than that: She was properly terrified. 

Irving Braxiatel was probably one of the strongest, fearless men she had ever met. In the almost fourteen years that she’d known him, she’d only ever seen him walk tall with pride and unwavering strength. His broad shoulders and confident gait exuded as much power as his mate’s much more delicately proportioned figure did. When he spoke, people listened. When he gave an order, people jumped. What he wanted, he got. He could cut someone down to a cower with a simple look. The only person in the universe he would ever back down to was Romana, and even then, he stood tall in the shadow behind her – content and proud to be there. Her silent and viciously protective sentinel.

Not once had she seen the man brought to his knees. She’d never seen him cry out in anything less than anger or frustration. So, to see him now, on his knees with his arms wrapped around his head and crying out with agony, that completely terrified her. If Brax couldn’t stand up to whatever was attacking him, then who could?

She skipped from foot to foot with indecision and worry as to whether or not it was safe to attend to him. Her head flicked back along the path they’d taken to this point in search of his capsule. Darkness was falling quickly, and all she could see of the ship from this distance was the glint of the sun off her silver-steel shell. She considered rushing back to see if she could work out how to reach out to the Doctor or Romana to come help, but quickly remembered she had absolutely no idea how to operate any part of that complicated console of his to even try. She looked back to her brother on the ground and instead decided to try all that she could to try and help him on her own.

He didn’t shrug her off at all when she dropped at his side and tried to lift his head from the dewy blue grasses, but he didn’t release the hold of his arms around his head, either. The cries that continued to erupt from his throat were becoming hoarse, and the man struggled with each inhale barely able to draw in enough breath to power his cries.

“God, Brax,” Rose whimpered pathetically. “What’s happening? How can I help?”

One of his arms flailed urgently toward her. It searched the space between them and finally slapped a hard strike against her arm. His hand struggled to find her, and when it did, Braxiatel clutched her arm tightly. He pulled hard on her to try and pull him out of his pained position. 

“Help me,” he pleaded through his gulping breaths when he was able to finally look into her face. His eyes were soaked with tears, his face as red as magenta fruits, and his expression so pained and in agony that he was barely recognisable. “Screams, Rose. They’re all scream…” his back stiffened upward, then arched back as he let out another cry. Both hands flew to his temples and he clutched at his hair with both fists.

Rose knew she had only the one singular option right now. Although he wasn’t necessarily a big lad, he still had at least a half foot of height and sixty pounds of weight over her. She had to very quickly devise a way to be able to carry him back to the capsule.

She did her best to curl her arms around his chest and let out a long grunting groan as she tried to pull him toward her in a levering action that might haul him up to his feet. “I need your help,” she moaned out loudly. “C’mon, Brax. We have to get you to your capsule.”

“My head,” he cried out with a thrash of his chest that pulled him away from her. “They’re tearing it apart.”

“Yeah,” she grit out. “And if you don’t help me here, they will and you will die.” She pulled him against her again, slowly and awkwardly getting up onto her feet. She leaned over him and held her forearms underneath his armpits. “And you’re not leaving me here alone to die, Brax. You promised me!”

He was more than a dead weight to her. His thrashing under the pressure inside his mind fought against her. “I can’t,” he grit through his teeth. He let out another cry. His back arched back so far that he pulled from her hold completely. He fell forward onto his knees into the grasses, his rump was up in the air, his chest on the ground. His arms curled around his head once more.

Rose stood over him in a lean, and while it would have been perfectly understandable for her to fall into defeat, she allowed anger and frustration to rise instead. She let out her own yell before she stomped her foot hard on the ground. “For Gods, sake, Brax. Stop this nonsense and get up on your damn feet.” She stomped her foot again and pointed behind her toward the capsule in the distance. “You’re a Time Lord, A damn Cardinal in the high council of Gallifrey, mate of her Lady President Romana. This behaviour is a disgrace to you, to your status, and to your mate. So find your balls and get up off the floor, right now!”

His hand swatted out behind him in search of her. Rose rushed forward and took his arm. “Come on,” she urged through her teeth as she gave a grunt and finally levered him to his feet. He slumped heavily against her, which made the both of them stumble off to one side. She caught them before they could fall and curled herself around him. “I’ve got you,” she assured him with a strained voice. “But I’m really going to need you to step up and help out.”

He managed to find his footing, but there was really no strength to it. His face was still heavily set in a wince of agony, and his breath was short as he fought against it. His lean on her was heavy and extremely awkward for them both.

“Are you okay?” she asked him as they made the slow and painful trek back to the capsule. With each step away from the pit, Braxiatel seemed to make strides toward fighting off whatever was in his head. He still stumbled and weighed heavily on her, but it was easing. “I – I’m sorry about…”

He gasped wetly through an open mouth and shook his head. “It. It was the right…” he gulped then let out a moan. “What I needed to hear.” He panted out with a lift of his lip and a pained tilt in his head. “But, we … we _will_ talk … about what you said about my balls later,” he grit out.

“Yeah. Let’s not, ta,” she said with a moan. 

Rose pressed her hand to the capsule door and wasn’t surprised that it opened easily underneath her palm. “Almost there,” she assured him gently. “Just a couple more steps.” She turned in the doorway with her back to the console to help support him through the doors.

Braxiatel dared take a last look in the direction of the pit before he accepted her help to get inside. He saw a shimmering blue mist rush across the grasses toward him. There was no time to duck and cover before it was upon him. His arms splayed outward and his back arched deeply as though his chest was being pulled upward into the air. Once again, a long cry was ripped out through his throat.

Before he could be driven to his knees once more, Rose rushed from the capsule and ran around him. With a cry of her own, she rushed him. Rose braced her shoulder and collided with him hard. Braxiatel was driven from the misting cocoon that had enveloped him and landed on his hip and shoulder in the doorway of the capsule. Rose leapt over him and grabbed hold of the shoulders of his Oxford. She let out a long grunting cry and hauled him across the floor.

“Close the doors!” she demanded of the ship. “Keep whatever that is away from him!”

Immediately, the doors slammed shut. The snick of the lock to secure the doors was like a gunshot across the deck. Rose dragged Braxiatel to beside the centre console. Her effort was such, that when she finally let go of his shirt, she stumbled and fell backward onto her butt. 

“God, you’re a heavy one,” she cursed under her breath as she quickly scuttled around him. He was out cold. His face was a pallor of grey and white, his breathing rapid and short. Rose quickly held her hair back over her shoulder and dropped her ear onto his chest, first to the left where she felt the slow but strong beat of one heart, and then to the right. All she could hear was the thump from the left side of his chest.

She knew how to deal with this. Phiroi had taught her back in the early days of their work relationship. It needed to be kick-started with a good and solid punch to his chest. Oh, but she’d never had the full strength to do it back in the medical capsule. She also couldn’t imagine herself capable of hitting this man that hard.

“Life or death,” she muttered to herself as she leaned over him and cradled both of her hands together and lifted them above her head. “Got no choice. I’m sorry, Brax.”

She brought her hands down as a single fisted mallet onto the right of his chest. There was nowhere near enough force in her strike to have broken a single one of his ribs. She didn’t feel enough of a depression in his chest to believe that it did any good. She dropped her ear and listened against his chest. Nothing. She tried again, and then tried a third time. There was still no response and the only thing she seemed to achieve is to bruise up her wrists.

Finally, she rested her ear against his chest, feeling the sharp and shallow rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. The lack of thumping underneath her ear was too unsettling.

One heart was a survivable condition, though, she thought with a flash in hr eyes. If she could get him back to the house, then Phiroi and his teams could get that second one going well enough. She looked toward the console with hope in her expression; hope that quickly fell when she realised that she had no idea at all how to fly the ship or even try to use its communication features. She still hadn’t been taught how to use it.

She slumped and then moved back over the unconscious Time Lord. “Brax,” she said softly in urging. “Wake up, please? I need you.”

He remained silent on the floor, his head awkwardly turned to one side.

“Braxiatel, please?” she pleaded. “Please wake up. I don’t know what to do.” Tears welled in her eyes, blurring her vision and she began to gently shake him. “Please, Brax. Please. You promised me. Safe till we get home, yeah?” She dropped and pressed her forehead against his temple, hoping he could feel her worry and upset. “I can’t get us home without you.”

His breath drew up as a hitch, but he didn’t wake. A shudder rocked him from head to toe, but it stopped with him slumping into an even deeper pile on the ground. There was a quiet thud at his hip, and Rose dropped her eyes. His sleek black phone had fallen from his pocket and for the first time in what felt like an age, Rose began to feel some hope.

She snatched the phone from the ground and flicked it upward, holding it over his face to unlock the screen. With a fast swiping of her fingers, she flipped through windows to get to his contact listing. She ignored the amount of times his name appeared with a number next to it – his other selves, she assumed – and scrolled fast to find the first recognisable name she could.

“ _Hearts_ ,” was the first of such, and it actually made her smile a little. She had expected him to put his wife in as “ _Romana_ ”, and to see her so affectionally listed as _Hearts_ made her whimper just a little for him.

“You romantic fool,” she breathed out with an affectionate look toward him as she thumbed the contact and held the phone to her ear. She lightly ran her fingers through the short hair around his temples and along the side of his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll get us home. I promise you. Just hold on, okay?”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Romana juggled a tray of hot beverages and a box filled with pastries as she entered the front door of the house. Once the children were safely at school and daycare, she’d made a stop at the local bakery to pick up some goodies for the ladies and lords who had so diligently answered her husband’s call for clean up. It hadn’t been a pleasant scene for any of them to have to wander into, let alone clean, and she felt that some Earth treats would be a pleasant and welcomed reward for their efforts…

…And Omega knows she felt like some sticky sweet treats herself. Not as much of a fan of pie as her husband and brother in law – in fact she really didn’t like magnolia fruit all that much to begin with – she didn’t think it entirely fair that it was just the men of the house that got to experience a treat like that.

She wore a smile of expectation as she dropped the car keys into a dish just beyond the door and set the tray of coffee and tea beside it. She shrugged off her coat with a shake of her shoulders and let it drop to her wrists. With a flourish and a flick of her hand, she hung it from the hook beside her husband’s coat. She took a step forward and lowered her nose against the thick cashmere fabric of his coat, drawing in a deep breath of the light cologne he wore. 

She’d admit it to no one, even him, but she really did revere and adore that man on an exceptionally extreme level. Any moment spent without him drew a pain within her hearts. He was her rock and her saviour. Even when he was at his absolute worst, she still saw him at his very best. Both of her hearts beat for him, and she’d gladly give up all of her remaining regenerations to save him.

A jaunty Earth tune, an old number from the twentieth century that Rose had set as the ring tone for the man in question sounded from her phone. Brax truly and honestly hated the song and turned his nose up with disgust when he discovered it was his very specific tune. Romana, on the other hand, loved it. She’d always hold that few additional seconds to hear the old Disco song. She sang along to the song, curious as to why she was being called when he was home. With a look to where his capsule was typically parked, she noted that it was gone. In her annoyance to discover that he wasn’t home as she expected him to be, she folded her arms across her chest and very deliberately allowed the phone to ring out.

“Oh no,” she huffed out with annoyance. “I’m not talking to you right now.”

“Everything okay, Romana?”

“Yes, Doctor. Perfectly so, thank you.” she called back as she pocketed the phone in the hip pocket of her trousers and walked to the table. With clear frustration, she dumped the tray at the centre of it.

The Doctor scuffled back just slightly to dodge the splash of one of the cups and looked up at her. “Yeah. Not quite feeling that from you right now.” He lifted his eyes. “What’s he done, then?”

Daddy Cool sounded through the phone again. Romana ignored it buzzing and singing at her hip. “Why would you think your brother had done anything?”

“You not answering his call for one,” he answered with a backward slouch in his chair. “And while I might sometimes enjoy the music of Boney M from time to time when I’ve had a few rather strong beverages, I do prefer to hear a song in its entirety rather than short sounbites looping over and over.”

“Let me silence it then,” she offered with a very sweet voice and smile. She flicked it to silence mode and tossed it into the middle of the table. “So? What did I miss?”

The Doctor flicked his fingers between two men. “Nothing new, just these two extending the argument that was already in play when you left.” His eyes dropped to the phone as it started to buzz and jump on the table. “He’s being pretty insistent, Romana. Perhaps you should answer.”

“As he usually is when I ignore him,” she said with a sigh. “He will give up soon enough.”

“He’s with Rose,” he said with dryness settling along his tongue.

Her eyes widened. “He’s with Rose?” She shot forward and snatched the phone from the table. “Where did they go?”

“I really don’t know,” he answered. “Just said he needed to have a word with her.”

She swept her thumb across the face of the phone and held up her finger to him to order silence when she answered the phone. She tried to keep the worry out of her voice when she answered – hopefully hey were only at the store and he was asking if she needed anything.

“Braxiatel,” she said with forced flatness in her tone. 

“Romana!” Rose’s voice answered with relief. “Thank God you finally picked up!” 

The shock in her voice was unhidden. “Rose?” Her eyes flicked toward the Doctor as he quickly rose to a stand. She held up her hand to him to ask for calm. “Why are you using Braxiatel’s phone? Where is he?”

There was a stammer at the other end of the line, and Rose spoke so quickly with a voice so full of fear and panic that Romana could barely understand her. 

“Rose, Rose,” she urged with a worried look toward the Doctor. “Calm down. I can’t understand you. What’s happened?”

“What’s going on?” the Doctor asked urgently.

Romana held her hand up to him. She wasn’t looking at him, instead she looked off to one side to concentrate on the other end of the conversation. “What’s wrong with Brax? Slow down, Rose. Take a breath.” She inhaled a deep gasp and her eyes flew up to the Doctors. “Telepathic assault and now he’s down to only one heart? Is that right?” She looked with desperation toward the Doctor. “The connection is terrible. Can we call the capsule from your TARDIS?”

He stalked quickly around the table. “Phiroi, come with me.” He pointed toward the others at the table. “Calling a break. Go to your corners and splash your face with water, spit out blood, or whatever else you need to do.”

“Rose,” Romana assured quickly. “I’m going to hang up, but the Doctor will contact Braxiatel’s capsule directly from the TARDIS. “We can produce a holographic image of the two of you that will help us to help you. Okay? Just wait. Hold on. We’re on our way.”

The phone disconnected and she jogged to keep up with the Doctor as he stalked into his TARDIS, Phiroi not too far behind him.

“What happened?” the Doctor asked sharply as he ran up the ramp toward the centre console.

“Rose was difficult to understand,” Romana answered him. “But it does appear that your brother has been seriously hurt. Only one of his hearts are still beating, and Rose can’t restart the other.”

“I heard you say telepathic assault,” he said dangerously as he spun and flicked levers and dials on his console. “Is Rose okay?”

“Terrified,” she answered. “But otherwise alright as far as I can tell.” She swallowed thickly. There was worry in her eyes. “Doctor. Your brother. He doesn’t have any regenerations left.”

“I know,” he whispered.

“Whatever’s happened…” She drew in a shaking breath. “I can’t … not without him.”

Phiroi put his hand on her arm, his voice was calm and supportive. “It won’t come to that, my Lady. Rose is a gifted nurse. Have faith in her.”

His brows lifted, although his face was angled down to the console. “Phiroi is right, Romana. Rose is with him,” he assured her. “And she’s familiar with treating injured Time Lords.” He still didn’t look up. “She won’t let him die.” He gave a growl of cheer, and held the rotor column in both hands, leaning forward to give it a big, loud, kiss. “Oh, you beautiful ship! You found him.” He pointed near the jump seat. “They will appear over there,” he advised her. “Remember, image only, but at least we’re in the same room – of sorts – for this conversation.”

Romana looked toward where the Doctor indicated with hope in her hearts. As promised, a flickering image appeared and slowly solidified into a stable image. Braxiatel was clearly unconscious. He was on his back on the floor, his head rolled off to one side. Rose was on her knees just off frame, but quickly crawled back on her hands and knees over to him. She looked toward them all with desperation in her eyes.

“Help me,” she whimpered out. “I can’t .. I don’t have the strength to get it started.”

Phiroi moved across quickly, dropping into a crouch at her side. He looked over Braxiatel with a critical, analytical eye. He then flicked his eyes to Rose, who looked to him with hope. “What was the cause of this?” he asked her.

Rose lifted her face to watch as both the Doctor and Romana dropped into crouches beside the Time Lord Medic. “I’m really not sure,” she admitted. “He.. I mean something got into his head. Something bad, like a thousand screaming voices he said.”

Phiroi looked over Braxiatel’s head and shoulders. “Telepathic assault, or telepathic overload?”

“Overload, I think,” she said with a little more strength in her voice. She ran her hands over her hair and drew in a couple of breaths. “When we got here…”

“And where are you?” the Doctor asked.

“Not right now,” Phiroi snapped. “Bigger things to worry about.” He looked back to Rose. “Please go on.”

“When we landed, and walked out.” She swallowed. “He said that he was feeling foggy in his head, like he was walking through molasses or something. I was fine. Didn’t feel anything in my head at all.”

“Not an attack, then,” Phiroi offered. “Otherwise, you would have been assaulted as well.”

Romana shifted to sit on her hip at her husband’s side. She didn’t like the fact she couldn’t touch him at all, but was at least able to see him for herself. “What else, Rose?”

“We came across a cliff, or a ravine, or something. Brax said he could smell Lindos and Artron, and lots of it.” She paused when three sets of eyes shifted from Braxiatel and focused tightly on her. It made her feel quite small underneath all of their glares. “And. I. Ehm. Well, I thought it might be injured Time Lords, and said we should help. But Brax, he wasn’t too sure. Said it was too much, that the air was too saturated.”

“He’s more sensitive to it now,” Phiroi advised the other two Time Lords seated either side of him. “Without being able to produce Lindos himself, now, he’s identifying it far more sensitively than before. If he’s sensing atmospheric saturation, then…” He shook his head. “I don’t want to consider it.”

“Get’s worse,” Rose admitted. “We were going to go down and take a look…”

“Without calling me first?” the Doctor growled sharply. “Rose. You should have called me if either of you thought something was wrong. Neither of you have the power to regenerate…”

“Get mad at me later,” she snapped in reply. “Right now, I don’t need your snip, yeah? Brax needs help.” She looked to Romana and Phiroi. “Anyway. When we looked over the edge into the pit or ravine or whatever it was, Brax got upset. Said something about Time Lords, thousands of them, all in pain and screaming. Inside his head.” She panted. “It dropped him to his knees, and he was screaming in pain…”

Phiroi held up his hands. “Okay. That’s enough, I think. Thanks, Rose.” He looked between both Romana and the Doctor. “He’s had a telepathic overload. That many voices all screaming at him at once, he’s lucky his mind held out at all. Give me a moment to work out what to do with him.”

“He’s strong,” Romana said quietly. She looked at Rose. “And you managed to get him back to the capsule? All by yourself?”

Rose nodded. “He still had a bit of fight left in him,” she answered softly. “But then, when we managed to make it back, something else attacked him. I think that’s what did it.” She looked to the Doctor, whose face was set in a hard and angry frown. “Can you come get us, please? Bring the TARDIS?”

“Where are you?” he answered shortly.

She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. Australia or something…”

“Australia?” he asked with a creased face.

“No, not Australia on Earth,” she replied. “We’re on another planet. I don’t know. Somewhere that only has one month of summer or something – I really wasn’t listening to him all closely due to him handing me a gun I didn’t know how to use…”

“He did _what_?”

She pointed to the console. “Have the TARDIS find us! She’s a smart girl, she knows how to locate him.”

“His capsule is untraceable,” the Doctor growled. “No one, not even the TARDIS, can find him. Wherever you are, you’re alone until you can get him conscious again.”

“I don’t believe you,” she growled in challenge. “You’re the _Doctor_. You’re in the _TARDIS_. Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do. Follow the lines of transmission you’re using for this call – surely that will give you a general idea of where we are, yeah?”

“By the Gods I love that you thought of that,” he said with admiration inside a growl. He shook his head. “But I can’t. He..” he pointed to Braxiatel. “Has that capsule of his locked tight. No one can pilot it, no one can find it. No one, but him.”

“We need to get that other heart going, and force him to rouse,” Romana ordered. “Whatever you think it will take, Phiroi. You tell her to do it. Bring my mate home to me.”

“There is one option,” Phiroi said with a light wince. “He’s had a telepathic overload, which has knocked out a couple of key biological functions. He needs a decent shock to the system to kick it all into gear.”

“Electric shock?” Rose asked. “Like an AED? Does he even have one in here?”

“You’ll take out his other heart if you use that,” Phiroi said gravely. “You’ll end up starting one, shutting down the other, and so on, so forth.”

“More superior with two hearts, yeah, right?” Rose grumbled. “Make it more difficult, more like.”

“So what, then?” the Doctor asked. “I can’t find them for retrieval while he’s out cold.”

“Kiss him,” Phiroi ordered sharply. “Pucker up, Rose, and give him the best one you’ve got.”

Her face flatlined at that. “You can’t be serious.” She looked toward Romana and the Doctor, who hadn’t issued any form of incredulous objection themselves. “Aren’t the two of you going to say something.”

“It could work,” Romana said carefully. “The bond guard activated.”

“That’ll kick start anything,” the Doctor agreed with a nod.

“No!” Rose snapped at them. “I am not doing that. Think of something else.”

Romana looked to her with pleading in her eyes. “It’s a good idea, Rose. I support it.”

“Well I don’t,” she barked. She gestured to Braxiatel with both hands. “Don’t get me wrong, Romana. Its not like he’s not a fit bloke, but come on. It’s _Brax_. I can’t kiss him, that’s like kissing my _brother_.”

She looked at her with a straight glare. “Why not. He’s kissed you before.” She looked back to her husband’s face. “For much the same reason.”

“Hardly for the same reason,” the Doctor disagreed. He looked to Rose. “But yes. You have my permission, Rose. I won’t hold this against you in the slightest.”

Rose looked disgusted. “He kissed me? Brax. Him. _He_ kissed _me_? When? And how did you not kill him for it, Doctor?” 

“I punched him for it, if that makes you feel better about it,” he answered with a sniff of disgust.

Her eyes widened as she considered their conversation back at the house, and his abject horror at the mere suggestion of anything more existing between them than there should be. “No. I don’t believe any of you. If he did that, and I got a decent bond-guard-activating snog from Irving-bloody-Braxiatel, I _think_ I’d remember it.” She looked at him, considered it, then looked back to them with a shake in her head. “But no. I can’t. Please think of something else.”

“Do you want him to die?” Phiroi asked.

“No, I don’t,” she argued. “But that shit hurts, okay? It hurts a lot.” 

“Please?” Romana pleaded softly. “I’m asking you as a friend and as family. Please help him.”

“You know, for an emotionally, affection-retarded society of peoples, it certainly does seem that snogging is the answer to most of your problems. Might want to investigate that, yeah?”

“Rose, please?” she pleaded. 

She lifted her eyes to the sky and whimpered out. There was a shake in her shoulders as she bounced her knees, much like a child who was close to tantrum about not wanting to do a chore or go to bed. “Just don’t watch, okay?” she looked to the Doctor. “Please?”

She didn’t bother to wait for a response. Instead she took a deep breath and leaned down to Brax. With a light touch, she coaxed his head toward hers, then used the pad of her thumb against the middle of his chin to slightly gape his mouth. Then, with a whispered apology, sealed her mouth over his.

Cooler than the Doctor, and with a taste much more spicy, his mouth was initially unresponsive underneath hers. But as she closed her eyes, stroked her fingers down along his cheek, then cupped his jaw, and deepened the kiss with the touch of her tongue against his, she felt his response. She gasped, her eyes flared wide and she pulled back just slightly from him, separating their mouths for just long enough for him to sleepily breathe out the name of his mate. Then his arm snapped up, his hand curled around her head, and he pulled her down to draw her into a kiss of such incredible passion that threatened to drive into her soul.

A whipcrack of light and pain shot across both of their minds, and as his eyes blew wide with dawning horror to look into Rose’s equally stunned and horrified expression, they both separated with long cries of pain. He rolled onto his side to curl into a ball, she shuffled backward on her backside into a seated ball of shuddering pain.

“What, in the name of all in this universe that is holy, just happened?” he demanded angrily toward her, still on his side and still clutching at his belly. “I. Am. Mated!” he yelled. “And so are _you_ – to my _brother_!” 

She wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand then gestured toward the others. “They told me to,” she said with a whimper.

He rolled over to see Romana, Thete, and Phiroi watching over them with flattened and definitely not amused expressions. “You?” he growled. “Why? She’s my _sister_ , for Omega’s sake.” He quickly shot up to a seat as the situation began to dawn on him. “And how are you all here?”

“Hologram,” Phiroi answered. “Now, Cardinal, if you don’t mind, can you please advise if you have two hearts beating inside your chest?”

“Of course I do,” he snapped angrily as he finally drew himself to a stand. His hand dropped with invitation for Rose to take it to be lifted to a stand. When she shook her head in refusal, he gave his hand a flick to insist. Again, she refused, so he set his hands on his hips instead. 

“Please check, if you don’t mind,” Phiroi asked again.

“Capsule, body scan pilot,” he said with a dark glare and held out both arms. “Cardiological request – ECG, both hearts.”

“Rhythm of both hearts functioning within acceptable range, Lord Cardinal,” a computerised voice answered. “Do you require a deeper scan?”

“That will be fine, thank you,” he answered the ship. He gave a dramatic and very facetious bow. “Happy?”

Romana watched Rose slowly draw to a stand and then walk toward the console with her arms wrapped around herself. There was disappointment in the Time Lady’s eyes. “She saved you,” she warned her husband on a low voice. “As you are too guarded to allow any of us to find you when you run away, Braxiatel, the only option she had available to her was the one she used.” She lifted her chin as he flicked his eyes toward her. “Now, if you will, please provide us with your temporal coordinates so that we can ensure Rose is brought home safely.”

“Good idea,” he stated as he walked through the hologram of his brother and Phiroi toward the console. “Please bring Leela and the wolves with you.” He looked up at his monitor. “I need them.”

“For what reason?” Romana asked. There was less hostility in her voice and more concern.

He was refusing to look back at any of the holograms, or toward Rose. “Because whatever is occurring on the planet needs to be stopped.” His shoulders lifted and then fell with a deep breath. “I’ll need her help to do that.”

“Are you insane?” Rose barked at him with anger. She pointed at the doorway, her arm straight and taut. “I just pulled you from that out there. I had to practically drag you here. You almost died, Brax!”

“Now I know what to expect,” he answered without looking at her. “I’ll be better prepared.”

“How can you be prepared for that?” she demanded. “You can’t! I am not going to let you back out there.”

He smiled a condescending smile at her then looked back to the console. “How absolutely adorable that you think you can stop me.”

“Don’t think I can’t,” she growled threateningly. “I’ve dropped bigger men on their arses than you, you know. The Emperor of the Daleks and all of his battle forces, got rid of them as easily as snap my fingers.” She snapped her fingers, which made him flinch just slightly. “I shot the Devil himself into a sun and ended his evil reign, too. You reckon you’re anywhere near their class of bad guy, Brax?” She cracked her knuckles. “I’m willing to find out.”

A smile stretched across his face, but he didn’t look at her. “Looks like I wasn’t the only one who found their _balls_ ,” he said with amusement.

“ _Boobs_ , thanks,” she corrected.

“ _Boobs_ then.” He let his smile fall and hit enter on his keyboard. He spun to face the three Time Lord holograms. “I’ve lowered a security protocol on my capsule to allow your TARDIS to locate my capsule,” he said to his brother. “A one time only offer; I hope you know. Bring Leela and the wolves. Bring Andred, too, if you must.”

“I’ll see if they’re interested.”

“They will be,” he assured him. “Because what’s out there, Thete.” He blew out a breath through pursed lips and shook his head. “You and me. We can’t do it. Rose and Leela will have to go in with the wolves and put an end to this.”

“Now hold on,” the Doctor argued with a huff. “Rose isn’t taking part in anything. Not without me.”

Braxiatel shook his head. “No choice. What’s out there is far too dangerous for you, me, Romana, or anyone with even an ounce of telepathic ability.” He exhaled. “It’ll be particularly dangerous to Time Lords.”

“What’s out there?” he asked quietly. “What is it that has you so spooked?”

“The separated incarnations of tens of thousands of Time Lords,” he answered quietly. “Thirteen souls per man and woman. All of them tortured and screaming a telepathic tsunami across this planet.” He flicked his eyes upward. “Whatever is holding these souls here has to be stopped. I’m not leaving a single one of them here to suffer like that for the rest of eternity.”

~~ooooOOOOooo~~


	23. Pep Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax and Rose deal with the aftermath of the kiss... Leela gives Rose a bit of a pep talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about no chapter yesterday. I struggled a bit getting into it ... and despite having a couple more hours than normal, could barely make it past the 1K word mark.... Wasn't going to do that to ya.
> 
> So I left it to today instead to push out something a bit more acceptable. I do have another thousand words or so written additional to this, but I think I might save that snippet for tomorrow. It give away a bit, and I want to make sure I know how exactly to proceed if I post that bit. I'm pretty sure I do, but I want to really think on it. Those who have listened to Gallifrey will recognize the bad guy of this arc.... My own spin on this...
> 
> Anyway. I do hope you like this chapter.

~~ooooOOOOooo~~

Braxiatel’s words ended with silence among both the TARDIS and Braxiatel’s capsule. The former Lord Cardinal never tended to overreact on anything, and so for him to seem not only spooked, but quite obviously horrified by what he’d seen, no man or woman was going to question it further. The only person who dared to speak was the Doctor, and when he did it was with a low and quiet tone of assurance and understanding.

“We’ll be there in a moment,” the Doctor breathed low and firm. “Communication out.”

The three figures disappeared from Braxiatel’s command deck with a light wheeze and pop of closing static. He dropped his head and let out a low breath.

“Brax,” Rose began cautiously. There was clear and quiet discomfort and wariness in her voice. She’d never been a recipient of his ire in all of their years as friends. She’d seen her husband on the receiving end of it many more times than once, but Braxiatel was only ever softly spoken with her. To hear that voice thick and heavy with anger directed toward her; she didn’t like how incredibly small it made her feel. 

With Romana, the Doctor, and Phiroi within earshot, it was easy for her to puff up her chest and confidently give him a bit of snark and snip. Now that they were alone, however, that confidence had quickly fled. She swallowed around a lump in her throat and breathed out quietly. “I’m sorry. I really am. They said it was our only option to get your heart started again.”

His head snapped toward her. His eyes were wide with horror. “I was down to only one?”

She nodded slowly. “Phiroi said it was the best option. I mean I disagreed, of course I did, but then Romana insisted, and the Doctor pushed for it as well.” She finally looked toward him, into his surprised eyes. “The fact that both of our mates were pleading with me to do it has to tell you something, yeah?”

“Pleading?”

She dipped her head into her shoulders and rolled her eyes with discomfort. “Well. Romana was pleading – which is really _really_ unlike her.” She looked back to him. “And that properly scared me, Brax. Romana doesn’t get scared, and she certainly never pleads for anything.” 

“You’re right,” he admitted softly, his eyes down on the console surface. “She doesn’t.” He lifted his head to look up at the rotor column. “I must have _really_ scared her.”

“And me.”

He quickly curled his arms around her shoulders and pulled her into his chest. He dropped his chin onto the top of her head. “Thank you,” he said softly. After an exhale he sighed in a breath. “I suppose this means that I owe you one, right?”

“Yep,” she said with a pop on her P. Her confidence returned in full force and she managed a smile. “Which you can repay me by finding me a breath mint.”

“A what?”

“Breath mint,” she repeated with a slap of her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “So I can get the taste of you out of my mouth.”

He slumped and then groaned as he released her from his hold. “And with that, there goes our _moment_.” His eyes tightened as he watched her walk around the console away from him. “And just precisely what do you mean about eradicating my _taste_ from your mouth?”

“You’re a smart man,” she countered with a shrug. “Didn’t think you’d need an explanation from that. It’s pretty straight forward. But because you do seem confused.” She looked up and smirked playfully and pointed at her tongue before popping it back in her mouth. “Your taste: here. Need to get rid of it. A breath mint will work fine for that.”

He shook his head. “Juvenile,” he huffed. “You should embrace the fact that you actually got yourself a decent and passionate kiss from someone as magnificent as myself…”

“Desperate and messy more like,” she responded indignantly with a rake of her eyes up and down his oxford and trouser combination. “I’d think that Mr. _Magnificent_ here would know how to knock a girl’s socks off with a hard one on the mouth.” She held her hand up at her chest and twisted her palm side to side. The expression on her face was one of disappointed analysis. “On a scale of one to ten, I’ll give you a three or four. You lost points when you called me Romana.”

“Oh, please,” he argued with a roll in his eyes and a slump in his shoulders. “Three or four… Even omitting points for the unintentional name error – which is to be expected considering Romana is my mate – I’d still be at the eight or nine point level.”

“Nah,” she drawled. “Too much tongue, too messy.”

“Oh come on, it curled your toes,” he said with a smirk. “Admit it. When was the last time Thete did that to you – or better yet, when was the last time _you_ completely rendered him speechless with one of _yours_?”

“Are we _really_ arguing about this?”

He exhaled a sharp breath, lowered his head, and rubbed at his brows. “I don’t know how you do it, Rose,” he managed on a low voice. “But you do turn me into an adolescent at times.”

“It’s a gift,” she said with a shrug, looking to the side as the sound of the TARDIS’ relative dimensional stabiliser heralded her materialisation inside the console deck. “Huh.” She huffed out with surprise.

Braxiatel looked toward her, not at the slowly materialising TARDIS. “Yes?”

“He’s landing _inside_ your capsule?”

“Yes,” he answered. “It’s safer than materialising outside and having to then step outside to move across to this capsule. Is that a problem?”

“I just didn’t know you could do it.” She tilted her head to one side as the TARDIS fully materialised in front of her. “Though, there’s plenty of room, I suppose.”

“We don’t often like to do it,” he answered. “But when the situation calls for it, it’s safe enough.” His brows pinched. “Unless, of course, it’s the same capsule, then you’re looking at a temporally dangerous event in space and time.” His eyes flared briefly. “Been there, done that…”

“Got the T-shirt,” Rose offered with a smile.

“And please don’t tell Romana I just admired that to you,” he added on a breath with his eyes rolled to the ceiling. “She is very … oh how can I put this delicately…?”

“Anal-retentive about the rules of temporal law?”

“Yes. You could say that.”

“Again, not lying for you, Brax,” Rose said with a shrug. “I won’t bring it up, but if she does – totally on your own with her wrath.”

“Understood.”

There was a creak in the hinges as the door opened. Rose half expected that the Doctor would be the first one out of her doors, but instead the two massive Gallifreyan wolves bounded out excitedly. Soliarn took off around Braxiatel’s console with his head low and his nose to the ground. Tiallu bounded to her mistress and was immediately up on her hind legs to put her front paws on Rose’s shoulders. She excitedly licked at her face, drawing both giggles and an ew from Rose for her efforts.

“Awww, is my sweet little girl all excited to go for a walk then? Sick of being cooped up at home with little Neroli?” She scratched at both sides of the wolf’s head. “I know the feeling, darling.” She tipped her head to Braxiatel. “’cept, I’m usually stuck with this one.”

Braxiatel ignored Rose’s dig at him. His eyes were locked on the investigative sniffing of the male. “If that thing even thinks about marking his territory or urinating in here, I’ll kill him.” He looked back toward Rose to make sure that she heard the threat he’d put upon the animal and found himself face to face with Romana instead. His eyes flared with surprise, but he quickly took a slight step backward to be able to give her a light bow of greeting and apology. 

“My hearts,” he breathed out, his hand nestled between his hearts.

“You very nearly lost one,” she said quickly before he could launch into any form of ritual apology.

He lifted his head but remained in his stoop. “I very nearly did.” He drew in a breath. “And while I…”

His words were cut abruptly as she grabbed his head in both hands and pulled him toward her. He swayed and stumbled awkwardly from his stoop but recovered quickly enough to accept the hard and bruising claim she made of his mouth. His arms quickly snapped around her; one arm across her lower back, the other up just underneath her shoulder blades; and he dipped her backward just slightly. He kept her firmly inside that hold until the slightest whimper escaped through her nose and then released her with a sudden gasp. Her lips were still puckered and parted after he’d pulled back, and to Rose she seemed fairly dazed and close to speechless. He smiled a petulant smirk toward Rose as he steadied Romana in place. 

“Three to four, indeed,” he huffed out with indignance and a lift in his nose as he walked by her. “Beat that effort…” 

“Really?” she queried darkly. “Like, _really_? Are you actually doin’ this?” she narrowed her eyes at him and set her hands on her hips. “Just _how_ old are you again?”

“He’s got to be pushing 1400 by now,” The Doctor answered her, finally emerging from the TARDIS. He held a phonebook sized aged and weathered wooden box in his arms that was topped with a computer tablet, and wore a large, thick pair of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose. His eyes were on the tablet in front of him as he shifted his head left and right, and up and down. A small wolf cub followed close to his ankle, nipping and rolling at the loop of the shoelace of his Converse as he walked toward her. He then used all five digits from one hand to flick the image on the tablet as a full screen hologram against the wall. “Why’d you ask?”

“Because he’s being a child,” Rose murmured out slowly as she stepped up beside him and tilted her head at the display in the air – the image coming from the centre of the glasses worn by her husband. 

“It’s called: adaptation,” Braxiatel argued with a shrug.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He shrugged and moved to stand beside Rose. “It’s a key theoretical concept of your Charles Darwin. The Adaptation theory is the root concept of his theory of natural selection.” His arms folded across his chest as he watched the Doctor wade through a couple of calibration exercises with his camera and video feed. “A rather basic principle that I will expect you studied at school.” He drew in a breath. “Had you studied, of course.”

“I’m really going to regret asking this,” Rose muttered. “But just what’s the Adaptation Theory of Darwin got to do with you behaving like a petulant child right now?”

The Doctor narrowed his eyes in warning when Braxiatel used both hands to point at his chest, then used the same hands to gesture toward Rose. “Answer that question in the way I know you want to, Brax, and so help me you’ll know what it feels like to have a Converse shoe rammed up your….”

“That’s quite enough from all of you,” Romana interrupted with a growl. “We have much more important things to deal with now than petty arguments and one-upmanship. She looked toward her husband and her expression fell toward neutrality. “Your brother has put together a tracking and monitoring set up for Rose, Leela, and the two wolves.” She gestured toward Tiallu, who wore a harness around her chest that had a small camera mounted in between her shoulders, and then to Soliarn, who wore the same. “We also have earpieces for both Rose and Leela so that we can keep in constant communication.”

“Range?” Braxiatel asked gruffly.

“They could be on the other side of the planet, and we’ll still be in contact,” the Doctor answered as he flicked the remaining three video feeds onto the air in front of them. “The TARDIS will be linked to both Leela and Rose’s audio signal. If we need to, we can perform an immediate materialisation over the both of them…”

“Provided there isn’t any interference,” Braxiatel muttered darkly. 

“Provided that, yeah.”

Romana looked toward her husband. “Do you anticipate any interference at all?”

“I wish I could tell you for sure,” he answered with a shrug. “I couldn’t get close enough to make any such determination. However, we have to expect there will be some form of interference, telepathic or otherwise.” He looked to his brother. “Got any contingency plans for that?”

“Immediate materialisation at the last transmission location,” he answered. “I will be working on a encephalographic barrier once the ladies leave.” He looked to Andred. “Modifying the one I created back on Gallifrey for you during the Vardan incident. It will allow at least one of us to venture out there and remain relatively unscathed – telepathically, that is.”

“Yes, well, that one was only a partial design if I remember it right,” Andred agreed with a nod. “And required some very intense focus and concentration to work adequately enough. I take it you’ll use it for rescue if necessary.”

“If necessary,” he answered with a nod in his chin and a purse in his lips. There was a sound of displeasure from Leela at his rear. “ _Only_ if necessary, Leela.”

“I hope that you will not act foolishly,” she warned. “You must trust in me, and trust in your mate, or we will all fail.”

“I promise you,” he answered without looking back. “I will only activate rescue protocols if I feel that either one of the two of you are in too much danger…”

“Which you already feel,” Romana said quietly. “I can _feel_ your worry, Doctor, and your mate is still in the safety of the capsule.”

“Which is why I am going to leave the decision to mobilise the TARDIS on your command,” he said with a grit in his teeth. “If I had my way, she wouldn’t be going out there at all. And definitely not without me.”

“ _She’s_ right here,” Rose breathed out. There wasn’t anger in her tone, more resignation. She stroked her hand up and down his pinstriped arm. “I have Soliarn and Tiallu,” she said with a smile. “And I also have Leela. I’m safe as houses out there.”

He turned toward her and pressed his lips against her forehead. His eyes were wide and terrified as he looked toward his brother. “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

Braxiatel pressed his lips together into a half smile of understanding. He looked toward the pile of items still inside the Doctor’s arms. “So? Are we going to set the ladies up with the surveillance equipment you’ve procured from your TARDIS? I’d very much like it if we did this sooner rather than later.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said with a nod of his head. All worry seemed to flutter our of him completely as his eagerness to show off what he had in the way of gadgets. He walked to the console and set the box atop it. “I’ve had these for a while, but never had the chance to use any of it until now.” He opened the box and looked to his brother with a light smirk on his face. “Grabbed this kit from a vault at UNIT when I was there in my Third…”

“In the 1970’s,” Braxiatel muttered. “When technology of this nature really was in it’s infancy.” He poked his finger through a pile of chunky looking earpieces with mocrophones attached. “And this is what you want to go with?” He looked toward the doorway into the deeper parts of his own ship. “I am quite certain that I have much more advanced – and less cumbersome – tech in my lab.”

“Gallifreyan tech,” the Doctor muttered. “Which, yes, is far more advanced of course.” He lifted his eyes and a shoulder in a shrug. “And therefore can much more easily fall victim to jamming efforts … If this truly is an attack against Gallifreyans and Time Lords.”

“I’m quite certain it is,” Braxiatel confirmed darkly. “For a few reasons.”

“Being?” Romana asked with accusation in her tone.

“I’m not quite sure where you intend to lead with that, Romana,” Braxiatel said with a slide of his eyes toward her. “What accusation are you trying to make?”

The guardedness of his response and his stature answered her question well enough and she narrowed her eyes at him. “I think you know full well what accusation I’m making, Brax. It is hardly a coincidence that you and Rose ended up here, is it?”

He felt the glare of his brother on him but chose not to acknowledge it with a look. Instead he stood tall, squared his shoulders, and looked down toward her from across the console as he tried for flatly spoken innocence. “Estrail has long been known as a private and friendly planet. I brought Rose here with the intention of the two of us to discuss the events of the … of the evening I left.” He looked toward Rose, who stared at him with withheld disbelief and annoyance. “Isn’t that right, Rose?”

She felt all eyes on her at that question. She knew exactly why Braxiatel had brought them here, and it had nothing to do with any form of conversation about _anything_. His younger incarnation was responsible for this trip. Not wanting to lie, but also not wanting to start an all-out row before she stepped into danger, she let out a breath and shook her head. “Hard to say for sure as we didn’t get to it,” she began far too easily. “Brax did say that we needed to talk, which is why I came with him. But pretty much as soon as we stepped outside his capsule, we noticed something wasn’t right.”

The relief that crossed past his eyes was almost palpable. When eyes moved from her, she covertly held up a pair of fingers toward her brother in law, indicating that now he owed her twice. He nodded shortly and mouthed the words _thank you_ to her.

“Right then,” the Doctor drawled long, his voice indicating he knew there were more than a couple of omissions in his wife’s answer. “Care to let on how you believe this is an attack specifically toward Gallifreyans, and not a more broad spectrum style of, perhaps defense against off-worlders?”

“Voices of tortured Time Lord souls,” Braxiatel answered simply. “And _only_ Time Lords. Combine that with the atmospheric saturation levels of both Lindos and Artron…”

“Both?” the Doctor asked with surprise.

Romana seemed just as surprised. “Lindos saturation I could expect,” she stated. “Artron is produced in the Time Vortex and is only released by our Capsules in such high saturation levels during a regeneration…”

“To contain the Lindos,” Braxiatel added. “Yes. Indeed.” He looked to Rose. “Which is why Rose has such high levels of it in her system – to treat against the high levels of Lindos she’s been exposed to.”

Rose coughed. “I’m sorry? What did you just say?” She looked at her hands and arms as though half expecting them to be glowing. “I’m riddled with TARDIS energy?”

“Later,” he answered her. “We will talk.”

Rose looked to the Doctor instead. “Is it dangerous?”

He shook his head. “Completely benign, really,” he answered. “Except against Lindos. It can get pretty nasty with that.” He shifted his hands in the air to indicate an invisible ball in his hands. “It’s a radiation that will surround the molecules of the Lindos enzyme.” He slowly brought his hands together. “In a high enough concentration, it suffocates the enzyme...” He clapped his hands together loudly. ‘And BAM! Gone.”

“So,” she sang out long. “Not enough of it, and it’ll what, just contain it?” She looked to Braxiatel, who seemed to have a stunned expression on his face at her question. “You know, keep it held inside that little ball forever?”

“Oh by the Gods,” Braxiatel managed out with a roll of realisation in his head. “It had to come from the mind of a human, rather than those of us who should know better, but I think Rose is onto something.” He ran the flat of his palm down his face and exhaled a deep breath. “Artron can be used to contain the Lindos and put a regeneration into permanent stasis…”

“Or cycle through all regenerations and hold each one of them in stasis,” the Doctor breathed out worriedly. “The power that can be drawn from it is immeasurable.” His head flicked to Romana. “I’ve seen it. During the War, I landed on a planet where a Time Lord held himself within an Artron field during regeneration. He exhausted himself completely of the power to regenerate, but what the Sontarans were able to create from that raw power combination… It was…”

“Horrrifying,” Romana ventured worriedly. “In the hands of Sontarans, I can only imagine.”

“Honestly, I don’t think you can truly imagine what they came up with,” he argued softly. “They had created weapons that could have put them in the Time War with a decent chance.”

Romana’s expression didn’t’ shift from worried. “Do we know who is here then; and just what they’re doing with the potential energy reserve they have here?” She looked toward her husband, who’s expression was dark and annoyed. “Brax?”

His nose lifted with a deep sniff. He didn’t answer her question, instead he answered the one that seemed to be swimming inside his own head. “So, that’s what he’s doing…”

“Who?” Romana asked.

He flicked his eyes to hers. “Oh. No one in particular. Do excuse me a moment.” He walked with a stiff stalk in his gait toward the corridor. He paused before passing through. “Thete. Enough time wasting. Set the ladies and the wolves up, and let’s end this.” He looked toward the two humans. “Rose. Leela. I wish the both of you luck and safety. I’ll see you when you return.”

“Where are you going?” The Doctor asked.

“To test a hypothesis,” he answered over his shoulder as he walked through the door. “And hope to any deity watching that I’m wrong.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Darkness had fallen completely across this side of the planet. A large orange moon in the sky afforded the four intrepid wanderers a decent enough level of ambient, natural lighting to guide their path, but small LED lights affixed on headbands provided a safer lighting level.

Leela was less than comfortable with the devices the Doctor had attached to her. The glasses, thick rimmed, and laden with a small camera in the centre, was far too heavy on the bridge of her nose. The headband with its heavy light only further deepened her level of annoyance. An ear-piece that provided constant chatter from the Time Lords back in the capsule was teetering her too close to her tolerance level. More than once, she’d lifted a knife to the straps ready to cut them off.

“Is this really necessary,” she moaned to Rose after the five minute walk from the capsule toward the edge of the pit. “I am worried that it might be a burden toward my ability to properly protect you.”

“You’re not here for _my_ protection,” Rose said with a smile. 

“It is an unspoken request of your mate,” she replied with a shrug. “The Doctor worries for your safety.”

“He worries too much,” Rose said with a sigh. “I’m more than capable of keeping my own well enough …” Her words faltered out when she found the scuff marks in the grass where Braxiatel had fallen. She dropped the pair of climbing harnesses on the ground and let out a breath. “Even saved _his_ life a few times. Ask me, if anyone needs to worry about anyone is me frettin’ about him.”

Rose pointed to the ground, and the scuff marks. “Here’s where Brax dropped like a tonne. I’ll set up, and we can rappel down.”

Leela looked over the edge. “Are you sure that there is not a way down that does not require me to put all of my trust in a flimsy rope?”

“I’m afraid not,” Rose answered with a sigh as she hugged a tree to put a rope around it. “And it’s not real flimsy. These are the ropes used by the rescue ops teams on Gallifrey. Stronger even than Brax’s sense of self righteousness.”

Leela smiled, but didn’t remark on that. Instead she looked toward the two wolves, who were pawing urgently at the ground. “How will we bring Soliarn and Tiallu down?”

“We don’t,” she answered with a smile and a look toward her two precious wolves. Their eagerness to get out an about had their thick coats luminesce an almost greenish hue underneath the orange light of the moon. Both of them stood at the edge of the pit, their noses low. Low gruffs toward each other, and a gesture of their noses toward the treetops told Rose they were on it. “Looks like my two brilliant pups have already made their plans.”

Leela looked toward them as Rose handed her a harness. “How might they do that?”

Rose wriggled into her harness and clipped it closed around her hips. “They’ll use the trees.”

“They can climb?” Leela asked with honest surprise as she pulled on her harness. “But they are wolves. Wolves can not climb trees.”

“These ones can,” Rose assured her as she made sure Leela was safely clipped into her rope and harness. “Brilliant climbers, actually. Back on Gallifrey they hunted their favourite prey in the trees. I didn’t much like it when they brought home their leftovers and left it outside my bedroom door, of course…” She grunted as she tugged hard on a pull to tighten the harness. When Leela peeped uncomfortably, Rose chuckled. “Sorry. The tighter the better.”

“I could just use the trees like the wolves,” she offered instead. “This would make me much more comfortable.”

Rose shrugged. “Fine by me, of course. I can meet you on the ground.” A rather firm order filtered through the communications line from the capsule denying Leela’s request. Both women winced at the tone and volume of the order in their ears. “Well. I guess that’s decided then, isn’t it? Thank you, _Darling_.”

Leela sighed and nodded. “I am not a Time Lord,” she managed through her teeth in reply. “I do not take orders from Time Lords, Presidents, _or_ Doctors.”

More unhappy phrasing came from the capsule.

“Yeah, well, maybe if you said _please_ instead of making demands from the safety of the capsule,” Rose said with a sigh as she walked to the pit and turned her back to it. She gave a firm tug on the rope to make sure it was secure. “Might go over a bit better to those of us out here where it’s, you know, dangerous.” She leaned back over the pit, letting the rope take her entire weight and looked toward the wolves. “Okay, you two. Off you go.” She exhaled a shrill sound through her teeth that was not only a half-howled, half cried signal for them to move, but proved to be a good little bit of annoyance through the mic.

The wolves looked to each other, touched their tips of their noses together, then separated and took off at a run. They leapt as a perfectly synchronised pair across the space between the cliff face and the tree tops that swayed and swung at least five metres away. They both disappeared into their own trees with a swish and the crack of breaking tree limbs.

“They do get to have all the fun, don’t they?” Leela said with an envious sigh as she leaned back over the edge of the cliff beside Rose. “I wish to release the wolf inside me at times.” Her eyes shifted to Rose. “As do you, I feel.”

“You have no idea,” Rose admitted with a scrape of her feet on the edge as she started to rappel down the cliff. “It’s always in there, caged and impatient, isn’t it? Looking for any kind of release.”

“You feel caged?” Leela asked curiously.

“Figuratively speaking, I suppose sometimes,” she admitted with a shrug. “It’s within me. I feel it. It wants release sometimes, and I don’t really have an outlet to find that release.”

“Your mate isn’t providing you with that?”

Rose’s feet skidded on the cliff’s edge in shock that Leela had said that. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Release,” she answered simply. “Does he not make you howl like the wolf, Rose?” She exhaled a sound of surprise. “There was a time he felt it an honour and his duty to do that for you.”

“We are …ehm…” she exhaled a sigh and resumed her slow walk down the wall. “We’re still working things out. Not quite there yet.”

“What is it that holds you from him?” A remark from the capsule and both women let out a groan. “We have a long way to go until we reach the bottom of this climb, Romana. If we are to meet danger and possible death on the ground, then you will let us talk as friends on the way down.” She looked down into the incredible darkness below. “I will have to admit to surprise, Rose. You and the Doctor were always like Andred and me when it came to this.”

“I don’t know, Leela,” she replied with a sigh. “I still … Oh, I don’t know. Right now it’s hard to forget what brought me to Gallifrey in the first place, you know?”

“Do you love him?”

“Of course I do.” She exhaled. “My love for him has never changed.”

“Then I do not see the problem,” Leela offered with a lift of her head. She looked upward at her rope and prayed to her deity that it would be both long and strong enough to get them down safely. “If it helps you to know, I was in your place before,” she said with a sigh. “With anger toward my mate for his actions.”

“Is this to do with Torvald?” Rose questioned. “I don’t know what happened, but you have referred to that name with disgust…”

Leela did growl out loud and long at the name. “My mate. Andred. He made a foolish decision that hurt me very deeply. He made me believe he was dead. I suffered. I grieved his loss.” She sighed deeply. “And yet he was there. He watched me suffer. He watched as my heart slowly died without him.”

“My God, Leela,” Rose panted out with empathy along her breath. “How?”

“He did not tell me that he had regenerated,” Leela said angrily. “He took the life of another man and stood in his place instead of his own. He became a horrible weasel of a creature. One I wanted to kill just to look at him.” She stopped her climb to look toward Rose. There was moisture within both of their eyes, and mirrored sadness shared across their distance. “When I found out the truth. I could not forgive him. I did not want to believe that my Andred, my _lion_ , that he could be so cruel like that.”

“I really want to hug you right now,” Rose said with a whimper. “That’s so horrible.”

Leela let out a short laugh. “That’s a Time Lord,” she said with a shake in her head. “They do not think. They do not speak truth. They do not think of anything or anyone more than they do themselves.”

“And yet we love them,” Rose said with a sigh.

“Foolishly we do,” she agreed. “Because for all of their faults, they _love_ , Rose. They love like no other with the full force of the two hearts inside their chests.”

“And when you have that love,” Rose sighed. “Yeah. It’s the most amazing feeling.”

“And you miss that.”

“I do,” she breathed. “So much.” She kicked off the wall and dropped a fast couple of feet before steadying herself again. “Oh, I know he loves me as much as he ever has. I’m not doubting that at all.”

“If I might offer you my thoughts?”

Rose nodded. “Of course.”

“Take him back into your heart and into your bed,” she said simply. “Let him make you howl like the wolf you are. Make him howl like the winds of the storm that he is.” She took a breath. “If you punish him then you also punish you, and you are not to be punished for what _he_ did. Be mad at him. Be angry. But don’t…” She froze at words coming from the capsule and snarled. “You might not need to hear this, Braxiatel, but Rose does. So you will – as Rose says – shut up.”

“He’s probably right,” Rose said with a sigh. “We’d better focus.”

“I am quite focused,” Leela half snapped. “Unlike the Lord Cardinal, I am able to do more than one thing at one time.” She sounded out a single laugh at his response. “Lying does not count, Braxiatel, as it is as natural as breathing is to you.”

Rose shook her head and chuckled at the growling from the other end. “And you kiss Romana with that mouth?” 

“As I was saying,” Leela continued with a huff. “We do not have to forgive them. I will never forgive Andred for what he did to me on Gallifrey. Never. He knows this. But I love him. He loves me, and we move on. Together. Stronger.” Her feet touched the soft moist soil at the bottom of the cliff. “I make a vow to you, Rose. If you take the Doctor back into you bed and into your body, you can both move on … as Andred and I have.”

Rose touched feet to the ground and quickly unfastened the ropes and harness. It didn’t escape her notice at all that the Doctor had remained completely silent throughout the exchange. She chose not to make any decision or comment any further on it herself, but she would definitely consider it over the next while. For now, she let her head slowly pan left to right to let those back on the capsule see what she could.

“Seems pretty quiet down here,” she said quietly. “The air is very, very thick down here. Foggy.”

Leela agreed quickly. “It is hard to take in a deep breath. Very thick. Not unlike those days on Gallifrey where the air is wet and hot.”

“The ninety-percent humid days they get in mid summer,” Rose recalled with a sigh. “Fourty-five degrees with a Humidex in the fifties. Yeah, don’t miss that much, ta.” 

“Where are the wolves?” Leela queried with worry. “I thought they would be here before us.”

Rose lifted her head, drew in a breath, and then let out a long haunting howl up into the night. The howl danced low around them, unable to lift itself higher in the thickness of the air around them. In a short moment, the howl was answered by a long feminine cry followed by the lower and more masculine sound of Soliarn. Rose smiled, ready to emit another sound to her wolves, but thought better of it. She could do this with them for hours – and did on many nights on Gallifrey when her husband wasn’t home – but instead made the more punctuated sound across the way to tell them to stop their hiding and join her.

Tiallu’s blue-white fur appeared as a light blur through the dense, foggy air, bouncing with each bounding leap she took. Soliarn followed a short distance behind her, his bounds a zig-zag of strides as he leapt of what could only be boulders or fallen trees.

Rose didn’t need to drop into a crouch to greet them. They were almost as tall as she was when on all fours, so she waited in a high stand for them to greet her and Leela. Tiallu materialised completely into the clearing. There was something in her mouth, a greenish and withered looking thick branch of sorts.

“What’ve you got?” Rose asked curiously as her wolf dropped the item at her feet and lifted her head with a low-sounding wolf of pride that she’d found her an offering. Behind her, Soliarn moved side to side with obvious discomfort. His front paws pounded the ground and his breath was hot and steaming in the thick air.

A rustle in the near distance had Leela on immediate guard. She put her hand on Rose’s arm. “Did you hear that?”

“I did,” she replied with a whisper. She looked into the foggy distance, where Leela’s focus was. “What do you think?”

“I’ll take a look,” she offered quietly. “Stay here with Tiallu. Soliarn, with me.”

He dipped his head with a snort, lowered onto his haunches, and then leapt high over his mate to land flawlessly and proudly at a full stand beside Leela. He looked to Tiallu, sniffed the air, and then turned and followed Leela into the fog.

Rose watched with apprehension and worry. Although Leela was more than capable of protecting and defending herself, and that Soliarn was as dangerous as any beast that would dare come near them, she still worried. She looked toward her own dangerous sentinel with a light smile on her face. “Just you and me now, Tia,” she breathed out after a moment. “Now. What did you bring me, then?”

She dropped into a crouch next to Tiallu to take a better look at it. Her wolf was a playful one when the urge took her, but she wasn’t one to bring sticks to play fetch like an ordinary dog might. No. That was a little beneath the both of them. She pushed the glasses further up the bridge of her nose and looked at the ground, and at the shrivelled, wrinkled thing on the ground …

…That had a perfectly identifiable set of five gnarled and curled fingers at one end of it.

“What the hell?” she yelled with accusation toward her wolf. “Did you just tear that off someone?” Her back went up straight and she took a panicked look around them. “Doctor? What species of people are here? Does this …. God … this arm look like it’s from any of them?” She felt bile rise in her throat. “I can’t believe she brought me an arm.”

There was a rustle off to her left, and Rose quickly turned toward it. Immediately, Tiallu rushed to circle herself around Rose’s legs. She held her mistress back behind her and growled into the thick fog. Tiallu’s growls hung around them, only heightening the sound of her aggression into the mic and back into the capsule.

She could hear the suddenly worried chatter from the capsule and the warnings for her to stay behind Tiallu. She also heard the demand for her to keep her eyes toward the sound, to be brave and not look away. They needed to see who or what she was abut to face if they were going to assist in trying to best advice how to counter whatever it was that was on approach.

She heard her husband remind her to remember that he loved her … in those three very specific words that he rarely ever said to her.

“Can’t be good if you’re saying that,” she murmured worriedly. Whatever Leela was seeing, wherever she was, it was probably scary enough to warrant a good old “I love you, Rose” instead of his usually truncated “My hearts” vow.

The rustling ahead of her and Tiallu grew closer. It became more of a thumping, dragging sound of a limping individual. Rose held her breath and followed the Doctor and her wolf’s direction to stay well behind her as she prepared to face the threat.

A ghastly, green, withered and rotting face appeared through the thick fog. Its face was set in a permanent toothy snarl due to a good portion of its lip having rotted off, and it walked with a heavy limp as it dragged a non responsive rotten limb behind it. She didn’t need any further confirmation of just what was approaching them, but the moaning sound of a mindless, brainless creature did push the idea home.

She backed off slowly, driven backward by the backward stalk of her wolf. “You can’t be serious,” she growled almost pitifully to herself. “Doctor, Brax … tell me that isn’t what I think it is. Tell me that I’m not in a movie and that’s not a Zombie.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	24. Zombieland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zombies. What more can be said?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the amazing response to yesterday's chapter. I've had a blast chatting with you guys in the comments section. :)
> 
> Today's offering should give a bit of explanation and puts us in a really good place to have some Zombie fun and terrorise old Rassilon for a bit.
> 
> The bit with Brax and his "training" ... yeah, that was alluded to in one of my fav BF stories ... I ran with it and put my own spin on it. Next chappy will be fun for me to play with that.
> 
> Leela's disdain for Time Lords - she makes no secret of it - so I ran with that, too.
> 
> I really do hope you enjoy today's offering!

~~oooOOOooo~~

He didn’t like what he was seeing on the monitor – not one bit. Zombies were something that featured only in horror films on Earth – characters that were gross and morbid and absolutely not a real occurrence on any planet at all. 

At least not one he’d ever visited. Whatever this thing was, it resembled the horror flick character, but really couldn’t actually be the walking dead. At least he hoped not.

“Keep your eyes on it, Rose,” the Doctor ordered firmly. “Don’t take your eyes off it. Don’t blink. Don’t shift. Whatever you do, keep your eyes on it.”

At his side Braxiatel emitted a very low growl of worry. “Romana,” he said darkly. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell my that my eyes are deceiving me.”

“I wish I could, Brax,” she breathed out quietly as she brought one of her delicate hands to cover her mouth with horror. “But I am seeing the same thing you are right now.”

“I thought that virus had been eradicated,” he demanded with a low voice. “That we got rid of it. That we let it die off never to return.”

The Doctor looked between Romana and Braxiatel and their opposite expressions. Braxiatel was clearly angry, where Romana looked just horrified and upset by what she saw. “What is it?” he asked urgently. “What is that, and what danger are Leela and Rose in right now?”

“Not as much as we would be if it was us down there,” Braxiatel answered with a hard exhale. “But in danger enough, I expect.” 

“Right,” the Doctor drawled with a somewhat perplexed expression of disbelief. He exhaled a hard breath and turned just slightly to properly address both Romana and Braxiatel. “Obviously you’ve encountered these before. Where?”

“On Gallifrey,” Andred offered darkly. His eyes were narrowed and dangerous as he watched the feed from his wife’s camera. “During Pandora’s reign as President.”

“I’m sorry, who?” There was light, but somewhat annoyed incredulity to his tone. Obviously he’d missed something of very significant importance while he was avoiding Gallifrey’s airspace after the fall of the house of Lungbarrow. “What did I miss?”

“It’s a very long and convoluted story,” Romana offered with a look to Braxiatel and Andred before looking back to the Doctor. “It is not excusable for me to forget that you don’t remember what happened on Gallifrey before you came back with Rose.” She swallowed a lump. “You weren’t there for the worst of it.”

“Not for any of it,” Braxiatel corrected her flatly. 

“I remember a civil war,” the ventured after a moment. “A war that almost decimated the planet. During which there was a total ban on travel in or out of Gallifrey due to a pandemic of sorts.”

“A pandemic in the truest sense,” Braxiatel half snarled. “There was nothing _of sorts_ about it.”

“One created by a horrible person,” Romana growled. “Someone who wore my face and committed the worst atrocity Gallifrey has ever seen.”

“Which was?”

“A virus.” Andred answered with a wince of anger on his face. “One that we couldn’t contain, and one that couldn’t be controlled.”

The Doctor’s eyes were wide and horrified. “I don’t remember this.”

Braxiatel’s face was set in a wince and breathed in, then exhaled a shuddering breath. “You were off planet and non contactable for centuries, so you missed it. You missed everything. All of it.” He looked at his brother with a pained expression. “And I am glad you were, Thete. I am. because if you had been there. If you’d been infected…”’

“You were barely there yourself,” Romana accused Braxiatel softly.

“Because you exiled me,” he accused quietly. “You broke the vow of silence you made to me. Betrayed me to save yourself.”

“Don’t blame me for that,” she snapped in reply. “You exiled yourself by making that foolish decision to take Pandora into your mind.”

“To save _you_ ,” he barked angrily. “To save the woman my hearts beat for. To save _Gallifrey_.” There was clear hurt inside his eyes. “By the Gods, Romana. I was already forced to leave Gallifrey and to never be able to walk beside a Time Lord ever again.” He thrust his arm toward the Doctor. “Not even my own brother. You didn’t have to add to my heartsbreak by enforcing that exile and taking all that I had left in the universe away from me.”

“I had no choice,” she vowed with a forced lift in her shoulders. “I had to save Gallifrey as well. If you’d returned, I couldn’t have done what I had to do. It was the only way.” Her look was one of sadness. “Even when you could come back, you didn’t stay around.”

“I was working behind the scenes to do what none of you could,” he corrected. “I sold off my entire collection in order to procure what I needed to save what could possibly be saved,” he defended. “I couldn’t very well do that on Gallifrey while fighting not only an invasive and dangerous entity living inside my head, but a murderous virus spreading like fire.” He panted with a look demanding understanding from her. “So don’t you dare attempt to make me feel guilt with your accusations that I abandoned you all. I did what I did to save you, Romana. _You_.”

The Doctor held up his hands. “You can row about this later, you two. Right now, my mate, my wife, is in danger. Let’s focus on that, yeah? Tell me just what she’s facing here, so we can devise a game plan to keep her and Leela safe.”

“Zombies,” Andred answered simply on behalf of both Braxiatel and Romana. “Exactly as it says on the package. Mindless, brainless, former Time Lords ravaged by a virus triggered by regeneration.”

“Zombies?” he asked flatly, looking for confirmation that he’d heard correctly. This really couldn’t be happening. “Actual walking dead zombies?”

“Walking dead, indeed,” Braxiatel answered. He gestured toward the screen, to where the feed showed the same types of creature on all four camera feeds. “And all Rose and Leela can do is kill them. There is no hope at all for any of them that are left.” He pulled a phone from his pocket – the device given to him by his old friend back at the Zoo. He thumbed at a contact and carded his fingers across the top of his har as he held the phone to his ear. 

“Who are you calling?” Romana asked quietly.

“Narvin,” he answered coolly. She saw the tilt of warning in her head. “I have to let him know, Romana,” he growled. “I have to have him make sure that this virus isn’t at risk of returning to Gallifrey, because if it does…”

“Gallifrey is still recovering from war,” Andred agreed. “Our people and our planet are decimated. If this virus makes it back there, it’ll destroy what little is left.” He looked toward the Doctor. “I won’t let that happen. If I have to get out there myself and risk contracting it, I will. But you tell them, both my wife and yours that they have to destroy them. Destroy everything.”

“I can’t tell them to do that,” the Doctor shot back.

“Then I will,” Romana said softly. “Because I’m with Andred and Braxiatel. This cannot leave Estrail.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” he asked incredulously. “We have two wolves, and a woman with knives. Hardly an explosive combination.”

“No, but we know what is,” Romana said along a whisper. She looked toward the Doctor, whose face was quickly losing colour. “Don’t we?”

The Doctor began the shake of his head slowly. “Oh no,” he breathed out as he increased the speed in which he shook his head toward the idea. “Don’t you even think about it.”

“We must use what options are available to us,” she argued with a straight and firm tone of voice. “This is not the time for sentimentality.”

“Sentimentality?” he blurted incredulously. “That’s my wife out there. She’s not some mindless weapon for you to use at will.”

“Doctor…”

“And besides,” he continued sharply. “Even if I was so inclined to let you utilise it, none of us know how to safely wield that power.”

“I do,” Braxiatel corrected quietly with a curl in his lip that Narvin still seemed to be ignoring his calls. Despite assurances that Brax should be able to reach him no worries with this phone, it didn’t seem to work all that well. 

“You’re not snogging her,” the Doctor snapped. “If that’s what you’re thinking. And frankly, I’m tiring of everyone deciding that it’s perfectly okay to lock lips with my wife.”

“There are other ways,” Braxiatel said quietly as he pocketed his phone. He looked toward his brother with a tight and narrow gaze. He said only one word, and it was one that punched the Doctor hard in his gut. “Charlotte.”

“Don’t you dare,” he warned along a whisper. Although his tone was quietly hostile, the expression that passed through his eyes was one of regret and upset. “Don’t you even dare.”

Andred held up a hand. “Ehm. Care to advise the new guy about what you’re talking about here?” His eyes flicked to the monitors and then back to the trio that stood at the other side of him. “What power are we talking about, and does it put Leela in danger?”

“Leela is perfectly safe,” the Doctor assured him without taking his eyes off his brother. “Because Rose’s condition is currently perfectly stable – and will continue to be. Won’t it, Brax?”

Braxiatel kept his eyes on his brother but pointed toward the small disk-like device he’d been wiring and soldering over the past half hour. “Is that thing ready?”

“Close enough to it, why?”

“Because I’m going to use it,” he informed him flatly. “I’ll go make a quick change of clothing to better suit what’s out there. Five minutes. Have it ready.”

The Doctor shook his head. “If anyone’s going to use it, Braxiatel, it’s me.”

“What, so you can get infected with the virus so that the next time you regenerate – which with your track record is probably less than a half hour from now – you’ll turn into one of those zombies?” He gestured across the command deck of his craft. “Of everyone here, I’m the only one who can’t regenerate. The only one that virus can’t attack.”

“But we don’t know if you can still get infected by it,” Romana said quietly. “You still possess the symbiotic nuclei…”

The Doctor flicked his eyes to Romana. “That’s the main infection point?”

“Where it attacks during regeneration,” she said with a nod. 

“Do you have any information about it in your capsule matrix?” the Doctor asked urgently. At his brother’s nod he let one side of his mouth lift in a smile. “Good. Pull up what you can. I’ll feed the information down to Phiroi. He and I can work on a suppressor, and antidote, or an inoculation.”

“The greatest medical minds on Gallifrey couldn’t find a cure,” Romana informed him shortly.

“Yes, well the greatest mind of Gallifrey wasn’t on Gallifrey at the time, was it?” the Doctor said with a smirk as he tapped his temple. “But it’s here now, and if I put it together with old Phiroi, I am sure the two of us will devise some form of antidote.” His smirk fell. “Because if this virus is here, then I will suggest it will find its way back to Gallifrey at some point.”

“We also have an entire city of Gallifreyans back at the house,” Braxiatel offered with quiet concern. “Many of whom have regenerative capabilities. If Rose and Leela bring home any contaminate of it, we put them all at risk.” He looked to his brother, then rushed to the console. With a handful of purposeful keystrokes, he’d called up all of the information he had on hand about the virus in its original form, and then in the modified and more dangerous version of it. “There you are. Work your magic. I’ll go get changed and head on out to find the ladies.” He looked to Andred. “Until I’m able to get back out there, please keep the two of them safe.”

“My honour and my duty,” he said with a nod of his head.

Romana put her hand on Braxiatel’s arm. She held an expression of concern. “Brax. I don’t like the idea of you being out there. Your brother is far better suited and experienced with this.”

“My hearts,” he breathed out with a low sigh. “You don’t know how wrong you are about that.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Rose stepped back from the zombie that was slowly lumbering toward her. Its moans and groans were far too like the zombies in the movies back on Earth. She never liked zombie movies, so she certainly wasn’t all that thrilled to find herself living one of those movies on a random planet millions of miles from home with only a snarling wolf to protect her from it.

She wasn’t a killer. She wasn’t a soldier. She couldn’t imagine ever taking the life of another – even if the creature in front of her didn’t currently possess life.

The capsule feed had gone silent a good long ten minutes ago. The Doctor had warned her to keep an eye on the creature as though it was something looking to kill her, but then went silent.

“Great help you are,” she muttered under her breath toward her husband. “Leavin’ me all alone with this thing.”

Tiallu snarled dangerously and continued to walk the two of them backward and away from the beast. She seemed to be holding in a protective stance rather than try to attack it. As though she was waiting on an order from her to do so.

“Kill it,” she growled finally with a wince of distaste on her face at having to issue any such order. “Whatever you have to do, Tia, to keep the both of us alive.”

A loud rustle behind her made Rose gasp, but any whimper she was about to emit was overpowered in volume by the loud warrior cry of Leela, who shot out of the brush behind her. The proud and dangerous warrior of the Sevateem ran in a low stoop toward the creature, and with a yell and then a leap through the air, she practically flew past them. She was airborne with knives in both her hands and managed to turn herself in the air to slice her blades in a perfect criss-cross pattern across the zombie’s throat. She landed behind the creature into a low crouch, only to immediately launch back up to thrust both blades into it’s back – directly into both of the hearts that didn’t beat inside its chest.

She growled when she kicked into its back to pull her blades from its body. It fell into a groaning heap onto its belly. Leela stood her feet either side of its head and with a twist of her ankles, silenced it completely.

“Are you alright?” she asked Rose calmly with a wipe of her blades on her skirt.

“There are so many different ways I can answer that question,” Rose admitted with a wince. “What was that?”

“The walking dead of the Time Lords,” Leela answered her smoothly. “An easy kill, which helps us.”

“You’ve seen this before?”

“I have,” she answered with a slow nod of her head. There was a look of disgust on her face. “On Gallifrey. I think Romana called it the Dogma virus.” She looked to the creature, still and rotted on the grass. “An illness that the Time Lords can not recover from.”

“So if you’ve seen it before, you can handle them, yeah?”

Leela’s brows lifted and she looked to the creature at her feet. Her eyes then lifted to Rose. “Did I not handle that one?”

“You know what I mean,” she said with a huff. “I’m guessin’ there’ll be more of them.”

“I have met several,” Leela said with a shake in her head. “As has Soliarn. And I will say that your male wolf is a very good hunter.”

“He is,” she said softly. She swallowed back her fear. “So. Our sentinels back at the capsule have gone all quiet on us.”

“I had noticed,” Leela said with a nod of her head. “Which does mean that they have secrets they don’t wish for us to hear.”

“Well that’s good to know…”

“We are on our own, Rose.” Leela smiled. “But this is a good thing. We will not have them talking their nonsense in our ears, and will be able to work as we work best.” Her smile shifted to a grin. “As wolf sisters hunting our prey. Do you still feel caged?”

Rose dipped her head with a smile. “Scared more like.” She lifted her head. “I can’t fight like you, Leela. When I don’t have his voice in my ear, I don’t feel as safe.”

“You are a mighty warrior,” Leela suggested. “You just need to find the wolf inside you and let her free.” She took step at Rose’s side and slowly they moved deeper into the forest. “You don’t need the Doctor to find strength. You already have it.” She winked. “You are a woman, and not a Time Lord. They are two things that make you stronger than them.”

“You know, for a woman in love with a Time Lord, you don’t have many nice things to say about them.”

Leela shrugged. “I have spent many years on Gallifrey with the Time Lords. I love my Andred with all of the passion I have. I admire Braxiatel, Romana, the Doctor, and even Narvin. But they are all the same. Time Lords. Cowards full of secrets and lies.”

“So why do you fight for them” Rose asked. “And I mean all of them, not just the big four?”

“Because we are not cowards,” she answered simply. “And all lives are precious and worth saving. There are many innocent people that live on Gallifrey outside of the golden ball of the city. I have met them. I have lived with them and learned from them. I have also taught them my ways and given them my heart. They are the ones I fight for. The ones that wish to escape the lies of council.”

“And yet two of your best friends are the leading minds of the council.”

“Romana made changes. She opened the doors of Gallifrey and respected those who are thought to be lesser species than the time Lords.” She sighed. “Braxiatel. There is more to him than anyone, even his own mate, knows. He is not a coward. He is very like his brother.”

“Don’t say that within earshot of him,” Rose said with a laugh. 

Leela had to laugh at that, herself. “I admire Braxiatel. He makes sacrifices to save the ones his hearts beat for. He is a very … oh how do you say it? Ob-obnox..”

“Obnoxious,” Rose offered.

“Yes, obnoxious, very much,” Leela agreed. “But when I am away from him. I miss him. I trust him as much as I don’t trust him.” She looked into the distance. “When we lost him in the Axis. It hurt me deeply. It did Romana and Narvin as well, but they do not admit it. They became selfish and I did not like who they became without Braxiatel. We stopped being friends on that alternate Gallifrey. For a long time, I did not want to see them. And I didn’t. I walked away.”

“Where was Andred?” Rose asked, noting the lack of mention of her husband during this time.

Leela’s eyes darkened with hurt and anger, but she chose not to answer the question. Instead she gestured to the woods ahead of them. “It is best that we keep our minds on where we are right now,” she said quietly. “The past is the past, and it is better left there.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose offered with a small smile. “I don’t mean to pry on what is obviously very private for you.”

“It is instinct,” Leela assured her with a smile. “You wish to know me better. I understand. I wish to know you as well. To know you when you are not with the Doctor. When you can be who you really are.”

“I am always me,” Rose offered. “With or without him.”

“That is not true,” Leela said with a sigh. “Together you are one. Three hearts and two minds as one spirit. We are the fire to their ice. And that is as it should be.” She turned her head and gave Rose a dangerous smile. “But you as you, as Rose. You are a warrior, a powerful spirit. A wolf. You just need to find her.”

As if to punctuate her words, Soliarn called out in the distance. His howl was a broken series of haunting howling barks.

“What is that?” Leela queried.

“Location call,” Rose answered. “He wants his mate – and us – to know where he is.” She lifted her head to respond in kind, joined in chorus by Tiallu pacing at her side. She continued her call and looked to Leela with a waggle in her brow to encourage her to join in the call.

“Oh, I can not,” Leela said with a lightly embarrassed smile.

“Sure you can,” Rose urged. “Come on. Where’s your inner wolf?”

A heavy rustle in the brush beside them, and Leela offered her a dangerous smile. “My inner wolf is going to kill more zombies. Take my knife, you must learn to use one.” She handed one of her knives to Rose, then pulled another from her boot. She quickly palmed her spare blade. “I will be right back.”

“Yeah,” Rose said with her eyes wide on the sharp blade on a hilt and handle made of what looked to be bone. “I’ll, ehm, be right here, then.”

Tiallu was attached to Rose’s side, walking with a press of her thick fur against her legs. Rose felt comfort in the protection of her wolf and together they made slow movement forward through the brush. As they progressed, and with the sound of Leela cheering, grunting, and fighting in the brush beside her, Rose was able to ignore the mild swooping inside her belly. It was a sense of discomfort that she put down to her apprehension and fear of the unknown that lay ahead of them. But as they pressed on, the sense of dread and foreboding that was putting her stomach at ease began to rise. There was a swooping sensation inside her mind, and she found herself having to stop and shake her head to clear it from her mind.

Tiallu curled around to the front of her to stop her from moving any further forward. She looked up at her mistress and issued a concerned bark. It was a sound that seemed to reactivate the communication from the capsule.

“Rose,” Romana asked with an urgent yet soft voice. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she replied. “Leela’s on the rampage with Soliarn and seems to be enjoying herself. Nothing here to be concerned with.”

“That’s not what your wolf just said,” she argued lightly. “I can hear her concern.”

Rose clutched at her belly as it swooped and swirled, but she kept her voice straight even as her head started to swim. “It’s all good. She’s just being over protective, that’s all.”

“I can see what Tiallu sees,” the Doctor cautioned down the line. “You don’t seem well, Rose. Are you okay? Do we need to come and get you?”

She narrowed her eyes to her wolf, narrowing them further to see the camera with its blinking red light on her shoulders. “You little tattle tail,” she accused. “No. I’m good. This place. It’s just got that gross smell of death or something and it’s making me queasy,” she lied. There was another swoop inside her head, a tired and pained symphony of singing voices chorused across her mind. She swayed and pressed the butt of her hand into the centre of her forehead. “Oh, God… What is that?”

Tiallu let out a bark of alarm and turned back toward the brush ahead of them. She lowered onto her haunch and growled into the distance.

“Rose!” the Doctor barked urgently from his end. “What’s happening? You’re blocking the camera with your arm. Tiallu’s feed is too dark.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Just there’s this singing, in my head. Getting louder.” She panted lightly and pushed herself forward. “So sad. It’s breaking my heart.”

“Stay where you are,” Braxiatel’s voice gruffed over the line. “I’ll be there in a moment.”

“You can’t,” she warned him urgently. “They’ll attack your mind again…”

“Got a solution for that thanks to Thete,” he assured her. “Just don’t move from where you are, sweetheart. I’m on my way.”

“God. Don’t ever call me that again, yeah?” she warned him as she pushed herself forward through the trees. “It’s kind’ve creepy comin’ from you.” Tiallu remained ahead of her by her shoulders but was no longer trying to stop their progression. She continued to hear the song inside her head in a chorus of pained and devastated voices. “Why are you so sad?” she whispered to herself.

“Rose,” the Doctor warned her. “Stay where you are. Don’t make me come after you myself.”

“Yeah,” she answered back distractedly. She could hear light voices of dissent back at the capsule; a discussion of quiet urgency shared between those left behind. She couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. “Sure thing, Doctor.”

She held a hand upward to push aside tree branches as she pressed forward toward where she believed was the sourse of the singing inside her mind. Each forward step added another voice to the chorus of her mind. Some of them were solemn and sad, others were gruff and out of tune – more of a moan and groan than song. It was a cacophony of sound that was becoming too much for her tender mind to bear, but she pushed forward.

Leela appeared at her side, her breath short and panted. “Rose. The Doctor is talking to you. Why aren’t you answering him?”

Rose looked toward Leela, taking care to show her face in the camera. “I’m fine, Doctor. See?” She turned back to the trees. “I just need to see what’s over here.”

One eye was half-closed and her head was harshly tilted to one side to attempt to fight off the tic in her eye caused by the telepathic song swirling inside her mind. She finally breached the edge of the forest, and with one last swipe of her hand to push aside a tree branch, the scene that lay ahead of them was presented with all of its horrific glory to her and Leela.

Both women held their hands over their mouths in absolute horror. The song inside her mind raised to a fever pitch and she fell to her knees in the soft mud just outside the treeline.

“Oh my God,” she half sobbed out, her tears glimmering amber in the orange light of Estrail's moon. “Doctor. What is this?”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Braxiatel had only been gone from the console room for only five minutes when he emerged again from the corridor. His chino-style trousers and crisp oxford shirt had been replaced by a pair of fatigue trousers and matching button-down fatigue shirt in a shade of red so deep that it may as well have been black. The trousers were tucked into a thick pair of ankle-high boots that looked as though they could take on any terrain and probably step on a landmine without damaging them. He held a large hunting knife in between his teeth as he strode into the room, still tucking his shirt into the open waistband of his trousers.

“What are you wearing?” Andred asked him with wide eyes. “Isn’t that the cadet uniform of …?”

“It is,” he answered quickly around the blade of his knife before Andred could cite the name of the military academy he’d attended for a century after he’d left the Prydon Academy campus. He took the knife from his teeth and set it on the console as he fastened up his trousers and pulled the belt closed around his hips.

“That’s an elite and very rough academy,” Andred remarked with slight awe in his tone. “Who’d you have to murder to get that uniform?”

“Every moral I ever had,” answered coolly. He looked to his brother, who looked upon him and the uniform he wore with an expression of apology and sadness. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, Thete. It might’ve been your fault I ended up there, but it really wasn’t that bad.” He cleared his throat. “For at lest five percent of the time, anyway.” He gestured to the small button-like device on the counter. “Is that ready?”

“Just another minute,” he muttered as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and then leaned down over the console with his soldering iron in his hand. “You took a lot less time than normal to get yourself dressed. Must’ve opted not to admire your own reflection this time.”

“Not while wearing this uniform anyway,” he answered with a sniff as he walked past his brother and toward a cabinet against the wall. He hauled it open with both hands and held the doors open with his hands as he surveyed the items within. He felt Romana’s presence at his side and exhaled. “Not now,” he said softly, knowing the question she wanted to ask him. 

“You never mentioned this.”

His nose scrunched up. “It’s not a particularly pleasant memory,” he murmured. “But I did learn a lot.” He exhaled and reached into the closet to retrieve a couple of weapons. “More than I needed or wanted to know, of course.”

“From what I hear, more than any man or woman should,” she offered him gently as she cupped his face tenderly in her hand. “That’s why I had the entire program shut down. The graduates that come from that Academy, Brax. They are … _altered_.”

“That’s putting it kindly.” He kissed her forehead as he tucked weapons in a pair of holsters fastened to the back of his trousers. “At least you know why it is I can handle a weapon as well as I do.”

“And are sneaky, conniving, manipulative…”

He exhaled a sigh and lifted his head to the ceiling. “Yes. Of course.” He strode to his brother. “Not a positive trait to be mentioned.”

“Brilliant,” she continued from the cupboard. “Diplomatic. The ultimate strategist. The intensely passionate and loyal man I fell in love with and married.”

“The Loyal Betrayer,” he huffed with a shake of his head. He held his hand to the Doctor in a request for the gadget he was putting the final touches on. “That will keep my mind clear?”

The Doctor blew at the button to cool down the soldered points as he nodded in the affirmative. “You may need to concentrate just a little. It won’t stop everything, but it’ll allow your natural instinct to step up and block out the negative telepathic nudging before it can overwhelm you.” He pulled a thick circle of sticky gum from the countertop and pressed it into the back of the button. He lifted his hand and used his thumb to press the device in between his brother’s brows. “You should feel a slight buzz as the signal calibrates with your own telepathic signature.”

“Got it,” he said with a wince of discomfort. “And there it is.”

“Give it a moment.” He exhaled. “Are you sure about this? I can go if you prefer.”

“And get infected by a virus that was supposed to have died out a half millennia ago?” he shook his head. “I’m not taking that risk. Not with you.” He checked the seat of the device in his forehead with a firm press of his thumb. “Once I know it’s safe for you, I’ll let you know. Then you can swoop in as her hero and pick us all up.”

Andred made a sound of distaste and worry to get their attention. “Something’s wrong,” he muttered. Rose’s camera is shifting more than it should, and the wolf seems concerned.”

The Doctor, Romana, and Braxiatel quickly formed a wide line to watch the feed. Indeed, Rose’s feed did seem to move with awkwardness as through she was shaking her head, and the feed coming from the wolf showed her looking uncomfortable.

“Rose,” Romana asked with an urgent yet soft voice, knowing that if any of the boys were to aske the question it might come off less like friendly concern and more of an urgent demand. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she replied through the link. “Leela’s on the rampage with Soliarn and seems to be enjoying herself. Nothing here to be concerned with.”

The image shown on Tiallu’s feed showed a different story. No one standing on this command deck read it as anything less than her falling toward distress. “That’s not what your wolf just said,” Romana argued lightly. “I can hear her concern.”

They watched Rose clutched at her belly and struggle to keep her voice straight. “It’s all good. She’s just being overprotective, that’s all.”

“I can see what Tiallu sees,” the Doctor cautioned down the line. “You don’t seem well, Rose. Are you okay? Do we need to come and get you?”

Braxiatel growled under his breath. “Rose isn’t telepathic, right?”

“No,” the Doctor answered. “Aside from our bond, she has no ability that I’m aware of.”

Rose swayed over the monitor, and her video feed blurred as her arm shot up to cover the camera. Tiallu’s feed showed her swaying and pressing her hand into her forehead. “Oh God… What is that?”

“Telepathic overload,” Braxiatel ventured. “I felt the same way when I was out there.”

The Doctor didn’t like Braxiatel’s assessment, and he certainly didn’t like hearing Tiallu bark and then grow over the feed. “Rose!” he barked urgently with a step toward the monitor as though it would bring him closer to her. “What’s happening? You’re blocking the camera with your arm. Tiallu’s feed is too dark.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Just there’s this singing, in my head. Getting louder. So sad. It’s breaking my heart.”

Braxiatel performed a last double-check of his uniform and equipment. “Stay where you are,” he ordered firmly. “I’ll be there in a moment.”

“You can’t,” she warned him urgently over the comms. “They’ll attack your mind again…”

“Got a solution for that thanks to Thete,” he assured her. “Just don’t move from where you are, sweetheart. I’m on my way.”

“God. Don’t ever call me that again, yeah?” she warned in a way that made him smile. “It’s kind’ve creepy comin’ from you.” 

He pulled on a pair of fingerless gloves, a thin protective helmet fitted with a camera and communication set and kissed his wife on the cheek as he passed by her. “My hearts beat for you,” he vowed firmly. “I’ll see you soon.”

“And mine for you, Braxiatel,” she breezed gently with a touch at his hand. “My universe is you. Come home safe.”

“Knowing that you’re waiting for me,” he said with a smile and a lift of her hand to kiss her knuckles. “How could I not want to return safe?”

“You are a romantic fool,” she said with a sigh and an extension of her arm to keep hold of his hand as long as possible as he walked away from her. She watched with her hearts clenching with worry inside her chest as he stepped out of the capsule and into the unknown. With a shake in her shoulders to firm herself up and shield her concern, she returned to the monitor feed to hear the Doctor making demands and warnings toward his wife.

“What is she doing?” she asked after a moment.

“Not listening to me,” he growled in reply. “Leela!”

“Yes, Doctor,” she answered smoothly. “There is no need to yell, I have heard your conversation with Rose and am on my way to her now.”

“I need to know she’s safe.”

“She will be,” Leela assured him. She was heard – and seen – to caution Rose about not answering the Doctor’s questions.

Rose moved her face intot he direct line of Leela’s camera. There was a look of annoyance in her eyes. “I’m fine, Doctor. See?” She turned away from the camera, and Leela’s gaze followed hers. “I just need to see what’s over here.”

Andred, the Doctor, and Romana watched curiously as the feeds of all four monitors showed a forward trek through the forest. Occasional leaves and branches obscured a camera more than once, but for the most part, they were able to take in the scene quite easily.

“I wonder what has Rose so curious,” Andred murmured as he chewed on his thumbnail and watched the feed. 

“Braxiatel mentioned a possible telepathic intervention,” Romana breathed out carefully, not wanting to further push the already worried Time Lord on her right into throwing everything into hell to follow them all. His brother and his wife – two of the most important people in his life – were out there. It was clear he was barely holding himself inside the capsule. “If she’s experiencing even a tickle in her mind, then Rose will investigate.”

“More than a _tickle_ , as you call it,” the Doctor growled. “It was close to overwhelming her.”

“She’s not telepathic,” Romana reminded him. “Even a tickle against her mind will be overwhelming.”

“Then how does she handle the intrusions of _my_ mind against hers?” he questioned. “I’m not gentle in the slightest when I want to settle inside her mind, and she handles that well enough.”

“Perhaps she is more able than you believe she is,” Romana offered. “Perhaps you should look into her true abilities when she returns.”

“A song,” he remarked softly. “She described it as singing inside her head. A song, a sad song that was breaking her heart.”

“There aren’t any species on this planet capable of telepathic communication as far as I know,” Romana said with a shrug. “So I don’t know…”

“The capsules sing,” Andred offered. “I used to hear mine singing to me all the time.” He looked upward. “This one and the TARDIS have been trying to reach out to a new mind with playful flirting. Unsuccessfully, I might add,” he said with a chuckle of warning to them both. “I am flattered, of course, but I _have_ a mate, thank you.”

Romana and the Doctor shared a look of dawning realisation. Their faces lengthened with worry. They hadn’t factored in the abandoned and likely suffering time capsules who had lost their pilots and were now grieving their loss.

“Oh dear,” Romana breathed out worriedly. “Rose has an intimate connection with your TARDIS, doesn’t she?”

“Since she looked into the heart of her, yes,” he admitted. “She has connection with this one as well as the medical capsule that Phiroi pilots. The capsules and my TARDIS do tend to acquiesce when she makes minor requests of them.” He slumped his head rising to the ceiling and his jaw dropping with slow and heartbreaking realisation. “That means she’ll be sensitive to the cries of any ship in mourning.”

“And if there are as many Time Lords as Braxiatel suggests there are…”

“Then there’ll be just as many capsules in a state of distress.” He covered his mouth with his hand. “They won’t try to harm her, of course, but it’ll overwhelm her mind completely.”

Andred cleared his throat to garner their attention. “Yes. Well I think we have the answer,” he said with a jut of his chin toward the monitor feeds, all four of them showed a foggy marshy landscape filled with the tattered and rusted remains of hundreds of weak, dying, and dead time capsules.

Rose’s voice half sobbed over the communications feed. “Oh my God. Doctor. What _is_ this?”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	25. Brax-o

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax suits up and gets dirty... Rose communes with a thousand time ships

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reaaaaallly not sure how you guys will receive this chapter.
> 
> I mean, I hope you will like it and all... but it's a bit gross at a couple of points. Yeah, so be warned on that. 
> 
> Remember, action and stuff isn't my forte, but I'm doing my best. :)

~~oooOOOooo~~

Braxiatel stalked with purpose along the path that he’d taken with Rose earlier. It was much darker than it had been when the two of them walked, but he was still able to see his way well enough thanks to the night vision field across the visor of his helmet. It had been centuries since he’d worn this getup, and so it took a little bit of adjustment for him to look past the myriad of information that the scanner of the helmet provided. The contour of the terrain ahead of him was particularly annoying, but in a moment he had himself able to ignore the pale blue lines and focus on what he was actually able to see for himself.

He got to the clearing and took a quick look around. He saw the twin ropes wrapped around two trees and tilted himself slightly to look along it’s length toward the edge of the pit. “Perfect,” he purred to himself as he kicked up a leg to flick up a rope from the ground. He caught it with his gloved hand and flicked it hard, whipping the full length of it like an angry snake. He looped it around his hips, hooked a tight rope descender to the length of rope attached to his chest, then hooped the loops around his hips to a carabiner on his belt. He didn’t have a proper harness, but what he did have on hand was effective enough to make the fast trek down the cliff face without falling to his death.

He tested the strength of the tree trunk and Rose’s knot with a firm tug and walked over toward the pit. He turned his back to it and leaned back hard on the rope to give it his full weight. There was a fast slide of rope through the descender and carabiner, but it caught quickly. Confident he wouldn’t fall to his death, he kicked off the wall and let himself slide in a controlled free-fall toward the ground. It took only three kicks against the wall for him to finally reach bottom, and he did so quite heavily. The mud and sludge curled up around the tread of his boots and he curled a lip with disgust at the suction of it on the thick rubber treads. As he unclipped himself from the rope, he lightly stepped his feet free of the mud.

“Do we have eyes and ears on?” he asked into his mic as he roughly flicked the rope away from him and walked into a small clearing at the edge of what appeared to be a thick forest. He didn’t really listen to the responses from the capsule, just knew that there was chatter in the affirmative. 

While he did despise mud and the dirty sucking slop of it, the filthy terrain did offer him a decent show of just which direction the ladies had travelled. He dropped into a crouch and scanned over the footprints in the mud. It started as a circular, triple trodden mound of grey mud, but as he widened his search area, he did see where steps of indecision had changed toward a more purposeful stride.

“This way, then,” he murmured to himself with a lift out of his crouch. “Would one of you please ask Leela what the best method is of taking out these zombies?”

“Can do,” the Doctor replied. “Although I thought you already knew. Haven’t you handled these before.”

“No, actually,” he admitted with a cautious walk forward. His hand reached back to draw one of his firearms from its holster and he held it low at his side. His voice shifted to one of facetious apology. “Did I in any way make you believe that I did, Thete? Sorry about that. Would you have changed your mind about letting me out here if you had known I’d not actually met one face to face before now?”

There was a displeased grunt through the comms line. “Leela says you have to sever the spinal cord from the brain stem. Decapitation either external or internal work.” the Doctor answered flatly. “Typical neutralisation methods don’t work…”

“Obviously,” he huffed. “Can’t exactly kill something that’s already dead, now, can you? But remove its ability to move, yes. That makes sense. Remove it’s head.”

“Are you even capable of doing that?” the Doctor asked with strain in his voice.

“I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” he remarked within a long whisper as rustling ahead of him caught his attention. “You might want to turn your head and look away,” he advised coolly as he looked down to adjust a setting on his staser. He lifted it high to look down along the sight in wait for whatever was rustling the trees around him to finally appear. “This might get messy.”

“I’ve been watching Leela and Soliarn’s feeds for the past hour,” the Doctor answered. 

“Right,” he drawled. “Of course you have.”

A staggering, drooling creature slowly dragged itself out of the brush. It paused with a sway at the space between two trees and slowly shifted a creaking neck to look toward Braxiatel. Its lips turned up into a sneering smile and Braxiatel let out a long and apologetic sigh. “Lord Rentestil. I am so sorry.” He closed his eyes as he squeezed the trigger of his staser, not wanting to see the death of an old student at his hand. 

The staser fired a ribbon-like line of energy across the space between them. It shot into the throat of the creature and exploded with light and a spray of black ooze through the back of its neck. The creature spat out a mouthful of black, decaying blood, then tilted, swayed, and collapsed to the ground.

While he, himself, hadn’t seen the light and the spray of blood, those back at the capsule had. He ignored the gasps and groans of disgust over the comms, and strode forward. He paused over the body of the former Time Lord and looked down with a sigh and a shake in his head. “He had such potential,” he sighed with a step over the corpse and puddle of blood to move on. “He would have had a long and successful career in council.”

“Are you capable of continuing?” Romana asked him gently as she heard a softly spoken prayer in her husband’s voice for the fallen man. “You are bound to encounter more Lords and Ladies you were acquainted with on Gallifrey.”

“They are no longer the Lords and Ladies I knew,” he answered softly. “They are long gone now. These…” He sighed. “These are mindless creatures that wear their faces to taunt us.”

He looked to his side and held up his staser to fire at another creature who staggered out of the brush. The laser shot brightly across the distance between them. Light and sludge exploded enough to completely remove the back of its neck. Its chin and head flopped bonelessly forward onto its chest and it collapsed into a heap on the ground.

He stepped over the fallen creature with a wince on his face at the stench and mess of it. “That’s really quite disgusting,” Braxiatel muttered before reciting yet another prayer under his breath. He paused and looked up and then down, surveying the scene and getting his bearings as best he could inside thick blue fog. He exhaled at the press of voices trying to get inside his mind and forced himself to concentrate on locking them all out.

Rustling in the woods either side of him took away that focus and he exhaled a long and angered breath. “Looks like I need backup,” he muttered to himself. He lifted his hands to curl his thumb and finger in between his lips. He expelled a sharp burst of air over the top of them to send out a shrill whistle across the landscape. He paused to inhale and sent out another whistle as the woods around him spat out zombie after zombie until he was surrounded completely.

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~

On her knees in the thick grey mud that bordered what had to be the single most horrific thing that she’d ever seen in her life, Rose Tyler swayed in place. She felt a tightness inside her chest and a flare of sorrow and anger inside her mind.

Leela – although relatively short in stature – towered high above her. There was a look of utter disdain and disgust across her features as she looked across an endless sea of travel capsules. “What is this?” she queried after a moment. Her head flicked down to Rose, who was still in a devastated and penitent kneel in the mud. “The number of these ships. Do they match with the number of dead Time Lords on this planet?”

“God,” Rose managed out weakly. “This is horrible. There’s hundreds of them.”

“Doctor. Romana,” Leela said darkly down the line. “Is this how many of your people are here walking like the dead?”

“We don’t know,” the Doctor responded quietly. “There has to be at least that many, but we suspect there are many more who arrived here as passengers rather than pilots.”

“This is just cruel,” Leela growled. “This can not be how your people respect the fallen members of your tribes.” She panted a couple of sharp breaths. “Abandoned. Left to rot.”

“It’s not,” Romana assured her with as much anger in her tone as Leela’s disgusted voice. “You know that, Leela. You know this is not how we treat our fallen – Time Lord _or_ capsule. Even at the height of the pandemic, our infected people were kept on Gallifrey and treated with kindness.”

“They were not treated with kindness,” Leela corrected sharply. Her voice then softened slightly. “But, they _were_ kept on Gallifrey.”

“These people were sent away,” Rose noted softly. “With their capsules to die alone.” She slowly lifted to a stand and wiped her hands slowly on her thighs to rid her palms of mud. Her head was angles to one side as she analysed the tall cabinet-like structure of one ship that seemed to still hols some life within her. “But were they already infected with this illness before they came here, or were they sent here to catch it?”

“Rose,” the Doctor ordered down the line. “Stay where you are, please. Brax is on his way.”

“Yeah,” she answered distractedly. “Okay.”

A shrill whistle sounded off in the distance, which captured the attention of Leela and Rose. They both looked upward and then behind them into the woods.

“Would that be Braxiatel?” Leela asked. At her hip, Soliarn lifted his head and puffed out a series of short howls. He stood from where he sat on the ground and marched his feet in the mud with urgency.

“Go!” Rose ordered him sharply. “God knows what trouble he’s gotten himself into.”

“He is of the same blood as the Doctor,” Leela said with a small smile as she watched Soliarn launch into the woods leaving them with only the sound of hard heavy thumping of his bounds and the cracking of twigs and branches under his feet. “It is very likely he has found himself in much trouble.”

“Sol’s having way too much fun,” Rose said with a sigh. “I guess three and a bit years stuck in London with no chance to hunt was a bit boring for him.”

“He is a wild beast,” Leela agreed. “It is here that he is in his element. It’s where he should be.”

“I know,” Rose said with a sigh of regret. “As soon as I can get him back to Gallifrey, I will. He and Tia, they need their wilderness back.”

“And so do you.”

Rose shook her head. “The Doctor will never return to Gallifrey on a permanent basis,” she said with a sigh as she stepped from her place and slowly made her way toward one of the capsules. “If he did, he’d only be miserable.”

“He was not before, Rose,” Leela offered. “He was content and very happy.”

Rose gave her a smile and a light laugh that held no humour at all in it. “Oh, he had his moments, Leela, trust me.” Her smile fell and she looked forward. “But he’s a different man this time around. I don’t know he has it in him to settle down like that again.”

Leela hummed. “Have trust in him,” she offered. “The Doctor’s spirit is very like mine – wild and free – and if I - the one they call the savage – can settle with my mate, then I am sure he will feel honoured to settle with you wherever you choose to be.”

Rose nodded at Leela’s words, but she had ceased to really listen to her. She ignored the chatter from the capsule, of the Doctor’s demands for her to stay put, and of his frustrated ranting that for once, can she please listen to him.

She ran her fingertips over the outer shell of the closest capsule. With such an elaborate and intricate cabinetry design it was clear to her that its Chameleon Circuit had locked on the form it had taken during its last materialisation. There wasn’t a cabinet or capsule on the entire planet of Gallifrey that looked like this.

“Hello darling,” she said gently as she pressed her hand forward to swipe her palm over its surface. “What happened to you?”

The humming underneath her hand may as well have been the final wheezing breaths of the ship for the way it seemed to draw in and draw out with such pained effort. Rose calmed and lengthened her own breathing to match that of the ship. She walked closer to the hull and pressed her other hand against the wood. “Why are you so sad?” she whispered as she pressed her forehead against it. “Tell me what happened to all of you.”

“Rose!” The Doctor called out over the comms. “Don’t let them inside your head. Please.”

Before she could respond to him or even try to pull away an ethereal sensation enveloped her. It was as though a pair of arms had snapped tightly around her back and hips, and she fell against the machine. The song inside her mind elevated and heightened each one of her already raw and aching senses. She let out a long and soulful cry that sounded out the anguish felt by the ship herself.

Images of the ship’s terrified and panicked pilot filled her mind at that moment. He struggled to control his ship and pull her free from a temporal lasso that held onto the ship to pull her violently out of the time vortex and onto the planet’s surface. The atmosphere around them was thick and soupy and filled with terror and sorrow. Together they fought hard, ignoring the orders through their own communication that they were flying outside their designated flight path and to return immediately or face discipline back on Gallifrey.

The landing was a violent crash of sparks and explosions within the console room. The pilot was thrown by a amber tendril of energy that shot from the central rotor column to throw him hard against a tall white support strut that stood tall at the corner of the console platform. Thick orange-red blood exploded from the pilot’s mouth in a violent heave that sprayed over the console counter to drip thick droplets off its edge.

A crackled, static-filled hologram sizzled dimly to life from a small beam on the console to hover over the young Time Lord. The barely visible seal of Rassilon spun lazily in the air in a slow sweeping motion that seemed to whoop and whoop with each turn. The face of Rassilon appeared, his words began mid-sentence, mid-message, and his image, cloaked in the brilliant scarlet robes of the Prydonian chapter embellished with yellow embroidery, and topped with the headdress and proud cowl of the time Lord Council. His image crackled and flickered, his words cut and static, as he spoke of the gracious sacrifices required from all time Lords to rebuild their once magnificent society and elevate the Time Lords to their former glory.

It ended with haunted words and the Supreme President of Gallifrey’s image staring straight toward the unconscious Time Lord in a heap of the ground.

“We thank you for your sacrifice, Son of Time…”

The chest of the young pilot lifted awkwardly off the ground, and with a cry of sheer agony, his mouth stretched open wide to release a thick and opaque tendril of energy that swirled a complete circuit of the console room before rushing out through the open doors. It was a bright flash, followed by another, and then another, a howling face inside a bubble along the winding tendril – one bubble for each of the young Lord’s remaining regenerations. It was a blistering, flaming, violent cacophony of light and sound that filed the console room. Within only a few short moments silence fell again as the light escaped the capsule and the battered body of a young man exhausted of life and of regenerations slumped back lifelessly to the ground…

…Only to slowly shift and then move once more with a moan and a groan and a stagger as he hauled himself up to a broken stand. His broken limbs hung limply at his side, his shoulder dislocated and drooping, his head lolling to one side. With a drag of a broken leg, the dead man slowly lumbered toward the doorway leaving only the sounds of his moans and his scraping, dragging limbs in his wake.

Rose gasped and gagged against the capsule’s wooden hull. Inside her mind the weeping, anguished pains of the capsules that still held life sang the painful song of the last words spoken across their command deck.

_Thank you for your sacrifice, Daughter of Time. Son of Time. Sacrifice. Son. Daughter. Time._ Those words repeated over and over inside her mind, swirling and swimming into the devastated and grief-stricken song of the Time Ships left behind.

Rose panted out with confusion and desperation as image after image from each one of the surviving ships and the last moments with their Time Lords and Ladies on the command deck filled her mind. She spun in place and shoved her back against the capsule that had originally called to her. she couldn’t hear the panicked voice calling to her through her earpiece, nor could she see the worried form of Leela swaying in front of her with confusion as to what was happening to her friend. 

Her eyes could only see the rapid slideshow of images being shared by all of the ships. She could only hear the words of Rassilon, and the song of despair being sung by those in mourning.

“My heart,” she cried out finally. “It hurts, Doctor. It’s breaking.”

There was a rapid squelching sound of thick treads running across mud that finally found a way though the cacophony of voices in her mind. A familiar presence moved quickly in front of her, and she felt the hard touch of fingers against her temples. Her hands shot out to clutch tightly at a pair of very familiar strong arms and she fought to find her line toward safety.

“Concentrate on me,” Braxiatel’s voice ordered out in a hiss through his teeth. “You know where I hide inside your mind. Find me. Ignore everything else and focus only on me.”

She clutched onto the familiar presence inside her mind and focused everything she had left in her on that tiny crimson spark. Slowly, his face started to materialise through the fading slideshow of horrors. His face was shielded behind a filter of deep purple, and it took her a good few seconds to realise that the filter wasn’t a trick of her own eyes, but an actual visor over his face. His face was tightened into a deep wince of concentration and effort that bared his teeth. The sweat on his brow and the contortion of effort in his cheeks and face flicked a switch inside of her, and suddenly the song, the images, and the pain of grief rocketed outside of her mind.

She let out a gasp and collapsed against his chest. Her breaths were ragged and short and her tiny frame shuddered against his. Braxiatel released her temples with a snap of his hands. He held her under her arm and across her back with one arm, the other he pressed against the wall of the broken capsule. He held them in balance despite awkward positioning and waited for Rose’s breathing to settle back to something more acceptable; not speaking at all until she lifted her head from the softest part of his shoulder to look across the graveyard that surrounded them. Her mouth was still as gaped as it was when he found her, and her breaths escaped her as huffs within whimpers.

“Are you okay?” He asked her after a moment.

“No,” she answered with a huff. She struggled against him to pull herself back up to a stand under her own steam and pressed her back up against the capsule. “What the hell was that? What happened?”

“Time Capsules misbehaving,” he answered with a growl. He lifted his head and looked at the array of broken ships that surrounded them. “All of you, just back off. You hear me? Rose might have an enticing mind for you to want to bind yourself to, but you can’t. She already has a symbiotic link to another ship – and I shouldn’t have to remind any you how feisty a female type-40 can get if you try and sneak in and steal her bond-mate.”

“No, no,” Rose assured him with a lift of her hands in request for calm. “They weren’t trying to sneak-bond on me. They were telling me what happened.” She scratched at her head and winced lightly. “At least that’s what I think, anyway.”

“Don’t put it past any of them,” he warned. “They’ve all lost their pilots, and they’re desperate for connection. An open mind like yours – too tempting not to try.” His head quickly dipped off to one side as though listening to voices in his ear. He nodded quickly. “Yeah. Right. I think it fell out. Give me a moment.” He looked around the floor at her feet.

“What’re you looking for?”

“Your earpiece,” he answered her. 

“You mean this one?” she pointed to the thick and cumbersome device in her ear. “I think it broke.”

He huffed. “Archaic, so I’m not surprised.” He looked toward Leela, who was standing behind two wide-eyed and very silent wolves and drew in a breath. “Looks like Rose is offline to the peanut gallery back at the capsule – lucky girl – so anything you need to say will have to be filtered through Leela and me. Do be warned that we have a five-word limit on each message, and we’ll relay nothing of a romantic nature from fretting mates if you don’t mind. So, Thete, give it a rest.”

He held his hand to Rose to aid in helping her safely step off the bottom lip of the capsule she was pressed up against. “Come on. Best we get you away from here.”

“No,” she said with a shake in her head.

“Why not?” he asked. “Are you injured?” He looked her over. “Do I need to carry you?”

She shook her head. “No. Aside from a roaring headache of biblical proportions, I’m okay.” She looked around her. “But I can’t. I can’t leave them here. Not alone.”

“Rose…”

“No,” she averred with her hands finding a tight fold across her chest. “They don’t deserve to stay here and rot away like this. Would you like it to know that your capsule was left in a state like this; alone and in pain? Would _you_ , Doctor? Romana?” She winced and rubbed at her brow. “My head…”

He took one of her hands in his and started to firmly rub his thumb into the junction between her thumb and finger. His eyes travelled around the dark and extremely dreary area. “How about I make you this vow, Rose. We won’t leave them like this,” he offered. “Well. At this moment we have to, but I assure you, Rose. It is my promise to you that Thete and I will return with pilots. We will return and we will make sure that every single one of these beautiful ladies find themselves a compatible new pilot and are taken from here.”

“Promise me that.”

“My word on Gallifrey and my own glorious ship,” he answered with a smile. “I will allow Leela to do what she pleases to me with her blade if I go back on that word.”

“So many options,” Leela huffed with a smile. “Are you very sure that you wish to make that vow to her, Braxiatel.”

“Not really,” he answered. “With what little trust I have in myself to keep a promise, but I’m quite certain the very real threat of castration means that I won’t go back on this one.” He looked to Rose. “Well? Deal?”

Rose bit at her lip and looked down to where her hand was held within his. He was still rubbing at her hand and she tilted her head to watch the movement of his thumb. “What’re you doing?”

“Getting rid of your headache,” he answered.

“By rubbing my thumb?”

“Does your head still hurt?”

She looked up and actually thought about that. “Ehm. No.”

“Then yes, by rubbing your thumb.” He dropped her hand and took a few steps backward from the ship. He let his eyes trail over the full structure from top to bottom. “What did this one tell you about what happened?”

“Your Rassilon,” she answered darkly. “He’s up to something here. None of what’s happenin’ here is an accident.”

“How do you mean?” Leela asked curiously.

“The voices,” she said with a light wince in one eye. “Over and over again, each one of them. It was Rassilon thanking the sons and daughters of time for their sacrifice.” She walked a circle in the mud, taking her time to look over each one of the capsules within her sightline. “And not a willing sacrifice, let me tell you. Those Time Lords and Ladies, they were terrified.”

“Sacrifice of what?” Leela queried.

“Their lives,” she answered in an almost haunted tone of voice. “Every single one of their remaining regenerations taken from them.” She covered her mouth with both hands and shuddered with remembrance of the horror she was shown, and of the pain and fear expressed by the ship. “The capsule couldn’t fight against whatever force was pulling it down. Its pilot couldn’t fight it, either. The crash …” She gulped. “It was enough to kill the pilot or at least put them into regeneration.”

“And?” Braxiatel asked with a light croak in his tone. His mind, as vivid as it was on a normal day, couldn’t quite bring itself to properly envision just what Rose had been shown.

She looked at him with an agonised expression and shook her head. “I – I can’t,” she answered him. “It’s horrible.”

“I understand, but...”

“There is no _but_ ,” Leela huffed angrily. “Rose does not wish to look back and remember, and you will not force her to.” She lifted a sharp finger and widened her eyes in warning when his chin dropped to part his lips and argue. “You will not argue with me, Braxiatel. Can you not see that she is distressed?”

“Well yes, I can.”

“Then you will wait until she is ready to remember.” She looked upward at a crackling sound of heat an energy above them. There was an orange pinprick in the sky over their heads that was expanding as they watched. “Braxiatel?” she queried with worry in her tone. “What is that?”

He and Rose lifted their heads to look upward and the both of them narrowed their eyes with question as they tried to figure out just what was twinkling in the sky. It’s location certainly didn’t indicate a distant sun having a particularly _fat_ and _fabulous_ day. There was a warning over the comms, but Braxiatel didn’t need it as realisation quickly and horrifically dawned. He expelled one of his favourite Gallifreyan curse words and grabbed both Leela and Rose’s hands. “We’ve got incoming!” he warned sharply to get them moving into a run beside him. “We’ve got to take cover. I don’t _know_ what the shockwave from an impact at that speed is going to be like.”

His hands were still tightly around both Leela’s and Rose’s hands as he leapt them all over a tall boulder that sat at the edge of the graveyard. He only released their hands when they touched ground so that he could wrap them both in his arms to hold them tightly against the boulder and shield them with his body. At the sides of the ladies, the two wolves took up the protective shielding duty that Braxiatel couldn’t reach.

Rose and Leela were completely shielded on one side by the thick fur and body of a Gallifreyan wolf, and on the other by a protective Gallifreyan man. There wasn’t a single part of them exposed to the open air at all. Despite the whistling sounds of winds racing up along a fast tumbling ship, the crackling of flames, and the whining howling wheezing cry of the Relative Dimensional Stabilizer of the ship, both Rose and Leela felt incredibly safe and secure.

Braxiatel counted out along a quiet whisper against both their ears a quiet countdown to final impact. His grip around them tightened with each number, until with three, two, and one spoken with a hiss through his teeth as he prepared for impact. He pulled both their heads in against his chest and lifted his on his knees to ensure that they were protected from anything that the shockwave that raced across the top of the boulder could bring.

The rumble in the ground at his feet and knees, and the blast of superheated air over his shoulders drove him backward with its force. He growled in his fight against it, and at the started yelps of the girls that tore into his ears.

As quickly as it came on them, the din of the crash landing was over. The ground no longer shook, but the tall trees still swayed and rustled with the aftereffects of the shockwave. The crackle of fire and the final wheeze of the ship were all that remained, and slowly Braxiatel lifted high on his knees to look over the boulder. “Stay down,” he ordered gently as he drew himself up to a stand. “Let me make sure it’s safe…”

Rose was having none of being told to wait. “There’s an injured Time Lord in there,” she gasped out with a struggle underneath the rump of Soliarn. “We need to make sure he’s okay!”

“There’s no surviving that,” Braxiatel said gravely. He flicked his fingers on the hand he still held low in invitation for the two women to rise up. “Not even the capsule could have survived that.”

Rose and Leela drew themselves to their full height and gasped with horror at the new addition to the capsule graveyard. It must have been a proud machine when in flight, with a brilliant gold and silver hull not unlike Braxiatel’s ship with recessed markings denoting the pilot a man or woman with high standing in society. But now, it was defeated and angled to one side, charred and dented with a large diagonal tear that ran the entire length of the doors from one corner to the other.

“Lady Trimmiadiammir,” Braxiatel breathed out with low spoken shock and horror. “Not you, too.”

“You know her?” Leela asked.

“She was one of my students at the Academy,” he answered. “In Romana’s graduating class. From one of the ruling houses on Gallifrey. A brilliant strategist, and a kind hearted woman.”

The torn doors of the capsule burst open with a hiss of steam and a wheeze of struggling electronics. They watched as a round-headed python of brilliant light burst free of the capsule and howled across the air over their heads. One bubble with a howling face, and then another along the swirling amber limb. Another howling face within an amber bubble moved overhead.

“Are you seeing this?” Braxiatel asked the team waiting in the capsule moreso the ladies he stood with.

“That’s what the capsule showed me,” Rose said with a whimper. “Every remaining regeneration torn from the Time Lord’s body. Every single one of the ships; the same thing.”

“But where is it going?” Leela asked with eerie calm.

“Only one way to find out,” Braxiatel answered her with a light wag in his brow. “Come on, you two. Let’s follow it and find out.”

He took off in the lead with both women running hot on his heels. The edges of the unintentional V-formation were completed by the two wolves, who bounded a tight zig-zag movement off rocks and fallen tree trucks. They rushed past howling and limping zombified Time Lords and Ladies without so much as a second glance. Their eyes were lifted high on the tail of the regenerative snake leading them toward what could only be something incredibly dangerous… Or completely heart wrenching and horrific.

Finally, they broke though a tree line and into a wide and obviously man-made alcove of cement and steel. Braxiatel held his arms out wide either side of him to stop Rose and Leela from running by him as he skidded along the grasses to a halt. He didn’t want either of them toppling into the swirling tornado of horror that greeted them at the base of the small ledge that would take them to ground level.

Their faces, lit orange by the swirling amber tornado in front of them, lifted with a perfectly synchronized upward tilt of horror. Even with a full crane and extension of their necks, there was no end to the swirling column of light. Howling voices, and howling winds drowned out the sounds of anything else, and Rose found she had to yell if she wanted to be heard. She held back the whipping flip of her hair with one hand and caught Braxiatel’s attention with the slap of the other against his arm.

“Brax!” she yelled out. “Brax, what is that?”

“That,” he answered back with a yell of his own to be heard. Faces moved around the swirling funnel, each of them frozen in an agonised scream. “ _They_ …They’re the unlived remaining regenerations of thousands of Time Lords and Ladies.” His breath drew in hard and he winced as he fought off the mounting pressure inside his mind as each and every one of the regenerations within the funnel sought out a place inside his mind. “Thousands of them.”

~~ooooOOOOooo~~


	26. Tornado

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose sees something she really didn't want to see...
> 
> Brax get's himself into deeper trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a really tough day today, which made writing really really difficult. But I couldn't move into the weekend without a Friday chapter, so I pushed through a migraine (and for the first time the trick Brax used with Rose didn't work - Neither did Advil, actually, so I guess the headache wins this round) to do the best I could with half vision.
> 
> That said... it's shorter than is typical.
> 
> Now Rose is a little clever in this ... And before you huff, I think she's spent enough time around this lot that she's picked up a thing or two, ya know.
> 
> I really, truly, hope you enjoy this....

~~ooooOOOOooo~~

The towering funnel above them, and the sounds and energy it created had all three of them step backward. Rose lifted her head as she stumbled in a clumsy backward gait. She was desperate to see an end to it, but was horrified to see that it lifted high into sparking grey clouds filled with hot amber tendrils that branched a pulsing net of power in the sky. Each pulse seemed to contract against the clouds above them, pulling, pressing, and screaming across the sky.

“I’d almost call it beautiful if it wasn’t filled with howling souls of the un-lived,” Rose murmured to herself.

“Romana says there is nothing beautiful about it,” Leela said against her ear. “But I will agree with you, Rose, even if she does not.”

“It means more to her than it does me,” Rose answered with a sigh. “This is filled with the faces of people she knew – or at least would have known if they were weren’t ripped from their host.”

“An interesting term to use,’ Braxiatel mused darkly. “ _Host_. It’s morbidly accurate when one thinks about it, I suppose. The body being the vessel to everything that should be.” He pressed his fingers to the side of his helmet to increase the volume of his mic to be heard over the din of howling voices. “Thete, can you do a scan…?”

“Already done,” the Doctor answered gruffly over the comms. “The power readings are off the charts…”

“An official scientific term in the vernacular of a simpleton,” he answered in a displeased tone of voice. “I’m not an idiot, Thete. How about you clarify exactly what you mean by _off the charts_?”

“It means exactly what I said,” he countered. “Neither your capsule nor the TARDIS is able to give an accurate result because the figures exceed their scanning protocols. What you’re looking at is a funnel of such immense raw power that it can’t be measured. By the Gods, Brax, how is it even being contained?”

He looked upward. “I really don’t know that it is,” he admitted worriedly. “With every new set of regenerations being added, this power is only increasing. It won’t be too long until it engulfs the entire planet…”

“Could it become powerful enough that it could create something similar to a sun?” Rose asked with concern. She felt Braxiatel’s immediate and stunned attention on her. His wide eyes drilled against the side of her head. “A power source like that, I mean one that can actually be controlled… Your Rassilon could do anything at all he wanted in the universe.”

“Why would he not simply use a sun already in the sky?” Leela asked. “Would that not be easier, and much less horrific than murdering your own people?”

“Because one cannot control a sun,” Braxiatel answered more to himself than Leela. “Too much power all at once, it can’t be properly harnessed.”

“Yeah, but you make your own,” Rose offered. “Little by little, siphoning off what you can to keep it contained, controlling the build.” She looked at Braxiatel. “Then you have full control right up to when it’s at full power.” She looked back at the funnel and held open her hands. She looked between one and then the other. “Frog. Boiling water.”

“Containment is still an issue, though,” he argued lightly. “As the power builds, it will be come a more difficult beast to contain.”

“didn’t you say that Artron acts to suppress the Lindos?” she ventured. “And if you’re pulling Lindos from the regenerations, then I thinks it’s a safe bet that those ships back there are being drained of their Artron as well. Just the right mix of power and conductor to keep it under control.”

There was a brief pause and then Braxiatel inhaled a breath and spoke.

“I love you, Rose,” he muttered almost distractedly without looking at her. “You brilliant woman.”

Rose snapped her head to him, her eyes wide with horror. “I’m sorry, what did you just say to me?”

He slid his eyes to her. “Ahh. Yes. Message from Thete. Sorry, I should have made that more clear when I said it.” He huffed out as his hands fisted and shifted to press into his hips. “Whatever he took from your rather – I must admit – brilliant observation has him rather excited. For just _what_ reason eludes me right now.”

“Knowin’ him,” she ventured with a smile. “He’s managed to come up with something to help.”

“For all of our sakes, I certainly hope so,” he said with a huff. He then turned toward both women and held his arms outward to almost herd them in the direction he wanted them to go. “In the meantime, we should take our minds off this disaster and see what we can do about…” His eyes closed and his head shook slowly. “I don’t know what we can do about any of this.”

“We can see where this power goes,” Leela offered. She gestured toward the cement and steel structure at the other side of the funnel. “You can work … computers, can’t you?”

“Remarkably good at it, yes,” he replied with a one-sided smile. “Most of the security programmes used on Gallifrey use my coding, so I expect anything here will be easy to get into.”

Leela followed behind Braxiatel as he forced a wind-stumbling stride around the edge of the funnel. “You have always made a point of saying that no one can – as you say - break through your security protocols, Braxiatel.”

“No one except me,” he said with a wink. “I have a back-door pass to all of the programmes I write.”

“Yes,” she said with a light laugh. “Of course, you do. I would expect it of you.”

Rose didn’t follow behind Leela or Braxiatel. Instead she remained in place and stared into the howling amber column. Her eyes followed the movement of faces within the swirling energy, and of the contorting features as they howled out in pain. She took a step closer and angled her head to one side, wanting to see deeper within the funnel, and wanting to know just how far back the wall of the unlived wailed.

It didn’t quite escape her notice that she had found herself on a planet of paradox, surrounded by not only the undead, but also the unlived. The only truly living bodied souls on the entire planet belonged to two humans, one Gallifreyan, and two wolves.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered toward the whipping amber wind in front of her. “I wish I knew how to help you.”

A full apparition stretched up inside the centre of the funnel. It was an arch of a creature; a dark blob of a shape without limbs. She watched as it shifted through the funnel toward her. It didn’t sway of shift in the winds. It didn’t move or react as howling faces rushed through it. Rose’s eyes widened with worry and she felt the increase of her heart begin to hammer inside her chest. Curiosity kept her firmly in place and she watched the figure slowly shift and contort into something recognisable.

“What are you?” she asked as the figure approached.

He, and it was definitely male she noted with a smile at his naked form, looked toward her with a tilt in its head as it approached. His features deepened and became more defined the closer he drew. Definitely a handsome fellow with his square jaw and classically cropped dark hair. A small curl of hair fell down over his brow, and he wore a small smile that was bordered by a perfectly manicured moustache and goatee that had just a slight smattering of grey in it.

He stood before her, a towering figure over her much shorter frame. He stopped, a naked Time Lord in all of his natural resplendent and surprisingly sculpted muscular glory surrounded by the howling faces of his fellow Lords and ladies and held up a hand toward the wall of the funnel.

Rose looked at the hand he held outward, and then looked back up into his face with an expression of question inside her narrowed eyes. His blue eyes shimmered with humour and Rose’s face quickly lengthened with recognition.

“It’s you,” she breathed out through a gaped mouth. “From the park. I saw you – with Brax.”

Her head flicked away to look toward where Braxiatel was busily typing away on a computer terminal against the wall of the open alcove. She had, indeed, seen this man before. Nearly a year ago, Braxiatel had taken a detour during her weekly run to Tesco and pulled into a park. After a warning for her to remain in the car because he’d only be a moment, he’d gotten out, walked to the rear of the vehicle, and met with this fellow. Rose recalled the meeting quite vividly as she’d spent the entire fifteen minutes watching the man though the rear-view mirror.

Braxiatel had never told her who he was, just that he was a Time Lord who had information for him regarding the war efforts on Gallifrey. When he pulled out of the carpark, Rose had watched the rear view mirror again and was surprised to find him looking back at her. He tipped his fingers from his temple in a friendly, casual salute and leaned forward in a gentile bow.

It was unnerving for her at the time. This man looked at her as if he knew her ... and knew her well. Rose could only assume that they were set to meet somewhere in his past but her future. A past and future that had yet to properly run across each other…

…Was this supposed to be _that_ moment?

“Who are you?” she queried as she stepped forward to bring herself closer to him. She brought her hand up to his, pushing it forward to touch her palm to his. Her eyes widened and she exhaled a gasp as a small, glimmering tendril trailed from his hand to hers and curled around her wrist.

Braxiatel’s voice roared from her side. “Rose! Get away from there!” 

She didn’t have a chance to turn her head in question as to what he was on about. He ran at a rush toward her and collided hard against her side to shove her away from the wall. His arm came around her waist to prevent her falling in a complete heap on the ground, but he was unable to stop her hip from making a heavy impact. He landed on his knee at her side, his arm underneath her back.

“What in the name of the Gods are you thinking?” he demanded hotly. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he thrust his arm behind him in a gesture toward the fiery wall. “That is pure Lindos energy in there, Rose. More than the scanners of our capsules are capable of reading – and certainly much more than a human can tolerate.”

“I knew what I was doing,” she defended in a tone that was less than completely truthful.

“Woprat shit,” he snarled into her face. “You had no clue at all, did you? Just felt the need to press on into something you know absolutely nothing about.”

Her eyes flashed in warning at the hostility in his tone, she felt an irrational sense of anger rise within her in response. “You can stop yellin’ at me at any time,” she snarled in reply. “And you can get off me as well.” She gave him a hard shove with both hands, which forced her to fall completely in the soft muddy ground, but she was fast to shift onto her knees and then up to a stand. “I am not one of your students. I am not one of those red-suited guards you can yell at back at the capitol, so don’t you dare raise your voice at me.”

“I will if I think you’re doing something _stupid_.”

“My every breathing moment according to you and _your_ kind, Brax,” she snapped. “Inferior little human, remember, we’re not exactly above _stupid_ in your eyes, are we?”

His voice lessened to a growl that snarled through his teeth. “I told you not to ever say that again.”

There was a rage inside her eyes that glistened against the winds and power just over his shoulder. “Well. I guess I am too stupid to get it in my head, aren’t I?”

Her breath glistened in front of her mouth, and her eyes were afire with fury. Braxiatel took a small and tentative step backward, both his hands held up in surrender. “Rose,” he said carefully. “Do me a favour if you don’t mind: take a breath, just a small one. Calm yourself just a little.” He emitted a sound of indecision. “Ehm. Please?”

“He was going to tell me what to do,” she seethed through her teeth with a hard thrust of her arm upward. “How to stop this.”

He looked over his shoulder at the spinning wall. His brows locked together when he nothing but the wash of howling faces rushing by. “Who?”

“Him,” she declared with a point toward the glowing funnel.

“There’s no one there,” he answered carefully with a slow and cautious turn of his head back toward her. “At least no one specific.”

She looked around his shoulder and on seeing that the figure had disappeared, slouched backward and stomped a foot into the mud. A cry of frustration flew from the very back of her throat. “God, Brax! I had a perfect opportunity…” She panted at him, her eyes narrowed. “He was someone you know. I’ve seen him.”

“That’s impossible.” he challenged. “I don’t know these people, Rose. You don’t know them. The owner of the body they were supposed to regenerate from didn’t know them. None of the souls in there have lived even a nano span of a bodied existence.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she urged, her anger fleeing toward urgent explanation. “You’ve met him. I was there when you did.

He straightened up to his full height and looked down into her face. Her absolute vehemence that she knew who was in the funnel really couldn’t be ignored. “Where? Where did you see him?”

“When we were heading to Tesco,” she explained with a more eager and friendly tone. “Remember; when we stopped off at the park because you had to meet that Time Lord you said had information about the War?” She searched his face as his expression went to blank as he tried to recall. “Dark hair,” she pressed. She circled her finger around her mouth and chin. “Neat looking moustache and goatee. Crystal flipping piercing blue eyes that look right through ya…”

He angled his head downward, and it had a slight tilt to one side. “Blue jeans, white shirt, black vest and grey blazer?”

“Seems awfully specific,” she breathed out with widened eyes. “Yeah, I think that might be it.” Her eyes flicked to the funnel. “’Course, in there he was buck naked with everything on display…”

Braxiatel coughed into his fist with a show of clear discomfort. “Yes. Well. We don’t exactly regenerate a change of clothing. It is a rather naked affair, I suppose.” He shuddered a shake in his shoulders,t hen looked at her with a serious expression on his face. He spoke calmly and with little emotion. “I do believe your eyes were – as you say – playing tricks with your mind. It’s quite impossible that you saw who you think you did.”

“No. I’m pretty sure I did,” she said without uncertainty. “Same guy. I’ve got no doubt.”

Braxiatel turned back to the whipping funnel and looked at it for a long moment. After a shake of his head, he grabbed her hand and tugged to force her to follow. “Come on. Best you stay beside me for now.” He exhaled. “Based on the litany I’m hearing right now in my ear, Thete’s only hanging on by a thread from materialising down here to pull you out.” He tugged harder when she hesitated. “And we don’t need him getting infected with this virus – unless you want a limping, snarling zombie as a husband.” He snorted. “Though not much of a difference to now, I suppose. And will you please shut up, Thete. You’re giving me a headache!”

Rose finally let him lead her toward the computer terminal that Leela leaned over. She used the point of one of her knives to mindlessly pick out random keys from the keyboard. 

“Who is he?” Rose asked him calmly.

“Really none of your concern,” he answered. “You truly didn’t see what you think you saw, Rose, so best we don’t continue to speculate.”

“I think that I agree with you, Romana,” Leela said coolly without looking up from her task. She was obviously in conversation with those left in the capsule. “And as I do often say: You know when Braxiatel is lying, because his mouth is moving.”

“I can hear the both of you,” Braxiatel said with a growl. “So enough of the passive-aggressive chatter between yourselves and come straight to me if you have something to say.”

“I saw what Rose saw,” Romana answered him with a straight tone down the line. “She did, indeed, see a figure within that funnel. And it was definitely an entity that knew who she was as he looked upon her as though he had seen her before.” She sniffed hard and although none of them could see her, it was clear that she was lifting up her chin with indignance toward him. “So you will explain to all of us who this Lord of Time was.”

“A man who does not and will not exist,” he answered through a growl. “A paradox. That’s all you need to know.”

“ _You_ ,” Romana breathed out. “It was _you_ , wasn’t it?” Her breath was hard and obviously hurt. “You promised me.”

He didn’t answer the question, instead he walked toward a small conduit box beside a door and used his knife to pry it open. “I need to hijack the signal feed that’s being relayed to Gallifrey in order to execute the new coding and release the statistical information we need. I’ll route it through my capsule matrix module. Thete, if you wouldn’t mind…”

“Answer the question, Braxiatel,” Romana demanded. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

“This time, beloved, you will have to,” he countered coolly. “Because I don’t intend on responding to a question that has a paradoxical answer to it. All you need to know is that I am aware of this Lord’s identity, and that his being here, now, and stuck inside a funnel of unimaginable power…” He paused to sniff. “It poses a potential danger we can’t possibly comprehend.”

“Or,” Rose offered quietly. “It’s a mistake of an unimaginable magnitude on Rassilon’s end.”

He flicked his eyes to her in question. “Rose?”

She smiled. “Silver lining, Brax. You guys should try it sometime instead of only focusing on the doom and gloom that exists inside a Time Lord existence.” She leaned her back on the wall behind him. “If this guy is _you_ , I mean a future you. And you’ve already met each other. Then he has a future, doesn’t he?”

He remained silent as he cut into the rubberised insulation coating of a thin wire. There was intrigue in his side profile that showed his focus was on his own thoughts rather than splicing wires.

She turned to lean her shoulder on the wall and face him. “If he doesn’t exist, then you couldn’t have met with him, could you? The information he shared with you wouldn’t exist.”

“Paradox,” he breathed out. “Timelines can change.”

“Not like that it can’t,” she argued with a smile. “I’ve watched Back to the Future, you know…”

“And if you think that’s in any way an accurate representation of Time Travel, then go ahead, Rose, and ignore what I said about you not talking down on yourself about your level of intelligence.”

She reached out and touched his arm. “Brax. You can’t tell me that you’re not thinking the same thing I am right now.” She shook her head as she clutched around his arm to get his full attention. “This can’t be the last you. There’s no way the universe will allow Irving Braxiatel only three lives out of thirteen, and you’re too arrogant and in love with your presence in the cosmos to _let_ it be your last.” she blew out a soft breath and softened her tone. “And I don’t want to let it be your last, either. I kind’ve like you a little bit.”

“Just a little bit?” he questioned inside a whisper.

“You’re a smug, arrogant, condescending, know-it-all prat,” she said with a smile. “Can’t trust you as far as we can throw you, but you’re my best friend. My brother. So, yeah. Maybe a bit more than a little bit.”

“Even if that was me in there,” he said with a turn of his head to look at her. “Which I am still not wholly admitting to. What do you – or any of the strategic brains inside my capsule – propose we do about it?” He turned and pressed his back into the wall. “It’s not like we can pluck the future me out of there and shove him back into my body, is there?”

“And we still have the virus to consider,” Romana offered. “Even if you did manage to get all of your regenerations back, Brax, your first death and you’ll be a zombie, just like the others.”

“That’s only if I’ve been affected,” he said on a low voice.

“Which I can guarantee you will be,” she shot back. “That entire whirlpool is affected. Anything coming from that will be. You will have to be quarantined and exiled from the house until we find a cure. There is too much at risk.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he said with a sniff. “What’s to say that I’m not already infected just by being here. You said it yourself, Romana, I still possess the symbiotic nuclei. From the start, I knew if I stepped outside my capsule, I wouldn’t be returning to London with you.”

“Yet you did it anyway,” she replied sadly. “You self sacrificing fool.”

“Anything not to have to deal with your panel of mindless rebellion leaders,” he said with a smirk. He looked to Rose. “I have no idea how to do it, Rose, but I’m on board once Thete works it out.”

“He disappeared from the deck some time ago,” Romana said with curiosity and worry in her tone. “Said he needed something from the TARDIS.”

Rose strode forward toward the tornado. “I think I know what needs to be done,” she breathed out with light fear in her voice.

“Oh no you don’t,” Braxiatel growled as he strode quickly forward and grabbed at her arm. “If you think I’m letting you go near that…”

“That’s what you wanted me to do,” she said to him with a shift of eyes toward his.

“I don’t want you to do any such thing,” he corrected her. He flicked his hand at the whirlpool. “If you go in there, Rose. You’ll die. I’m not agreeing to it.”

She shook her head and pointed toward the column. “That you,” she clarified with a look back toward it. “He wanted me to step inside the funnel. And if he really is a future you, Brax, then he knows what needs to be done, because he’s been here before.”

“If we’re both here now, then no he doesn’t,” he corrected her sharply. “Timelines, when they’re out of synch, it’s almost impossible to remember.”

Rose chuckled. “You’re a Lungbarrow lad. Impossible is just something you haven’t tried to do yet.”

“I find myself agreeing with Rose,” Leela offered as she stepped up to Braxiatel’s side. “When the Doctor uses the word impossible, it does seem to be a challenge and not a fact.”

“Besides,” Rose offered. “Don’t the spirits of your lives not yet lived exist across all time? You see all that is, all that was, and all that can be in this body. Surely they see what you can’t, yeah?”

“Neither of the two of you are Time Lords,” he snapped in a huff. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, so just stop, please.” 

“What did you call him again, Rose?” Leela asked. “Con .. condes… Oh, what was the word?”

“Condescending arse,” she said with a sigh. “And speaking of arse.” She turned and slowly stepped backward. “I’ve seen you naked now, Brax. Buck naked, in all the…” she winced and cleared her throat. “In all your Time Lord glory. I’m almost thinking death is a better option than ever having to look at you and remember _that_.”

“Get back here,” he demanded with a hard stride forward.

“Leela, hold him back,” she growled. “If this is the only chance we have…”

“Then we need to take it,” Leela agreed with a nod of her head. She stepped in front of Braxiatel with her knife held upward under his chin. “I am not a Time Lord, but I know how to kill one who only has one life.”

Off to the side of him a slight warp in the fabric of their reality started to shift. The howl and whine of the TARDIS in materialisation was unheard over the sounds of the howling winds and souls behind them, and so in silence the pulsing blue of the ship slowly materialised into existence.

“Don’t let her do this, Leela,” Braxiatel growled through a curled lip.

“Trust yourself,” Leela answered. “You call to her for help, she needs to answer that call.” 

Her eyes flicked toward the TARDIS as it fully materialised in place and the doors burst open. Braxiatel caught that second of disconnect, of distraction, and shoved her wrist and her blade from his throat. With a grunt, he had her spun in place and held her tightly from behind.

“Thete,” he called out. “Stop her! For the love of Omega and the Other, stop your wife from doing this!”

The Doctor burst out of the ship wearing a thick, oversized orange space-suit with a domed helmet. His run was cumbersome, but he sped across the cement floor toward where Rose was on her own run toward the tornado.

“Rose!” He called out. “Don’t do this!”

She twisted at the very edge of the bustling, bruising winds and dropped a shoulder to brace herself against the force of power she expected to encounter. She gave the Doctor a look of apology and fear, then winced and let out a long cry as she threw herself into the wild and whipping winds of the tornado.

~~oooOOOooo~~

With his face lit only by the blue glow of a security monitor, Rassilon watched the security feed on Estrail with a scowl on his aged and withered face. His scowl deepened and held a decent measure of curious intrigue at the small blonde woman at the centre of his focus.

“Hello Rose,” he whispered with a darkened and dangerous tone. “I’ve heard quite a lot from the matricians about you.” He twisted a dial on the security console to tighten an image. “Let’s see what you’re really capable of, shall we? See if you truly are worth the efforts I am expending to procure you from the clutches of Braxiatel and the Doctor.” 

He took a seat at the console and leaned forward, his chin inside his palm as he watched the scene play out before him.

In the darkness behind him, a small statured Time Lord watched the Lord President and his interest in the small human woman on the screen. Without a sound and with a stealth that didn’t even shift the air around him, Narvin slipped out of the room and into the hallway. Once out of earshot, he pulled a thin black phone from his pocket and thumbed the only contact that existed.

“Romana,” he said with a flat voice. “It’s Narvin...”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	27. Coffee Basket

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narvin gets a special delivery ... then some really unsettling information... 
> 
> Nekkid Brax makes a reappearance...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I waited all weekend for THIS?"
> 
> Yeahhhh ... heh ... over estimated my writing capability here, didn't I? HA! Oh well, I did try....
> 
> A day full of interruptions and frustration and the return of a headache that I have found is coming from the incessant thumping of music coming through from the upstairs ... It's really annoying and just disrupts the flow, maaaaan....
> 
> Anyhooo, so I hope you enjoy this. Next chapter I can actually have the Doctor being the Doctor and doing Doctory things and being awesome like he is. I cannot wait!

~~oooOOOooo~~

There were thankfully no people walking the hallways of the capitol at this time of the evening. Nightfall on Gallifrey was definitely a quieter moment, perfect for some illicit stalking and intelligence gathering. It didn’t mean that his conversations couldn’t be monitored. There were plenty of ears around the place. Fortunately, as the coordinator of the agency that installed the security systems, he knew where each and every mic and camera was hidden.

His eyes were in constant motion as he walked and held his phone to his ear on the search for anything his agency wasn’t quite aware of …

…Not out of the realm of possibility.

“Romana,” he said with a low tone and a flat voice. “It’s Narvin.”

“Hello Narvin,” she replied with light impatience in her tone. “Is this important? We are in the middle of something right now.”

“So I saw,” he answered coolly. “As has Rassilon.”

“I’m sorry?” she answered with only a light sound of surprise in her voice. “Did you just say _Rassilon_?”

“Do we have an unclear reception?” he asked with a huff in his voice. “I’d much rather not have to repeat myself multiple times.”

“No. You came through clear. I was merely attempting to express my sense of surprise at the mention of our Lord President and his knowledge of our activities.”

“I see,” he drawled long. “Rassilon is not only aware of your current activities, Romana. He’s got it on livestream right now and is watching it with a rather morbid sense of rapt fascination.” He exhaled and took a look around him as he neared his office. “Tell me, Romana, just what is it that you, Leela, and Braxiatel are trying to do out there?”

“We are trying to put an end to an abomination,” she shot back with frustration in her voice. “To crimes committed against our people by the current Supreme Lord President.”

“That sounds ominous,” Narvin answered carefully. He made it to his office and looked over his shoulder before activating the door release to step inside. “What crimes has he committed?”

“You don’t know?”

Narvin let out a huff as he waited for the sensors for the lights in his office to activate and light up his desk. “I would hardly ask you if you did,” he replied with his own huff of frustration.

“If it was to find out what I knew about it, you would,” she corrected.

“Just get on with it,” he growled. 

“You dare give me an order?”

“Please Romana,” he breathed out with exasperation. “I need to know what level of interference I am expected to provide to you.” He exhaled. “And that’s only if I can provide any at all. The ramifications of what Braxiatel and Leela are doing right now is beyond anything any of you can comprehend – and on more levels that you can imagine.”

“Narvin, do you know what he’s doing here? What Rassilon has set up on Estrail, and the truly horrific nature of it?”

Narvin walked toward his desk, one hand inside the pocket of his tunic, the other held the phone against his ear. “How about you tell me,” he breathed out. There was as much curiosity in his tone that frustration or annoyance – but that was mostly due to the elaborately decorated gift basket that was on his desk. A basket that wasn’t there before he left.

Romana let out a huff. “I don’t know how much you know about what is happening on Estrail, Narvin,” she began. “And I do hope that you _don’t_ know what’s happening here.”

“Investigating perpetual power sources as is my understanding,” he answered distractedly as he poked his finger into the purple cellophane wrap surrounding the basket. He plucked a card from the ribbon tied at the top. “Natural resources from Estrail’s core. At least that’s what I read on the scientific reports from the planet.”

“That’s not even slightly accurate,” she answered darkly. 

His lips tipped into a smile as he read the card, unintentionally ignoring Romana on the other end of the phone.

_“Narvin._

_It was lovely to meet you, and thank you for helping Brax, the Doctor, Leela, and Andred from the assassination attempt. You left before I could give you some coffee beans, so I nicked Brax’s credit card to pull together a basket of the best from planet Earth for you._

_I have no idea at all how this will get to you, but Brax said he’d get it to you somehow. (he hasn’t checked his credit card statement yet, so for now assume it’s from him as well as me – until he throws a fit and then it’s all from me)_

_Enjoy! Instructions on how to get the best of the beans are inside._

_I look forward to meeting you again soon._

_Rose xox”_

“Braxiatel is right,” he said with a smile as he peered through the cellophane at the contents of the basket. “You are an amazing woman.”

“Narvin?” Romana replied with quiet and worried curiosity. “What did you just say?”

He hummed in question. 

“You’re being inappropriately familiar,” she continued. “At a very inappropriate time.”

His eyes flashed and he dropped the card to the table. “Oh, I am very sorry. I was talking to someone else. Please…” He cleared his throat. “Please continue.”

“Oh, do I actually have your full attention now?”

“Very much so,” he answered with a shrug as he undid the bow and folded down the cellophane. “You always do.”

“Rassilon’s power source,” she began with a huff. “Is not from the core of Estrail.”

“Then where is it from?” He held a bag of coffee beans and dropped his nose for a quick smell of it. “Estrail’s core power has always been known to produce massive energy and magnetic field spikes when its sun throws out flares. Hard to capture, of course, but he and his scientific board say they’ve found a way…”

“They’re using Time Lord energy,” she cut in quickly. “Specifically, the Regeneration energies of a dying Time Lord.”

The bag of coffee dropped onto his desk. It burst at the bottom seam, spilling dark roasted beans across his desk. He didn’t have focus on it to worry about the loss of coffee. “I don’t know that I want to ask this, Romana. But how is he doing that?”

“By stealing the remaining regenerations of a dying Time Lord,” she answered gravely. 

His breath drew in hard enough that he felt it as a pain inside his chest. His voice was barely a whisper. “How is he doing that?”

“How can you not know?” she charged him. “As the Coordinator of the CIA…”

“I don’t deal with the Scientific Council and their movements,” he corrected her. “You should know that, Romana. The CIA is responsible for a lot of things, but not all of them. What Rassilon and the current circus of fools on council get up to have become a mystery even to me.”

“I hardly believe that for a second,” she argued on a low voice. “When I was President, you knew everything.”

He snorted. “I never feared death when you were President, Romana. With Rassilon…” he drew in a breath and continued slowly. “He’s a tyrant who is not above a public execution and excise of all regenerations if only to make an example of you.” He flashed his eyes to the door. When he continued he was barely audible. “I don’t have _any_ regenerations. I can’t take the chances that I used to.”

“Yet you still take a chance for me…”

“You were my Lady President,” he answered her. “And you always will be. Loyal to you until the end, if you will.”

“And I thank you for that,” she said with honest affection and appreciation. “With that said, can I ask that you do some digging for me and learn what you can about Rassilon’s use of the Dogma Virus to send Time Lords to their death here on Estrail.”

“He’s doing what?” he barked out with shocked incredulity. “The Dogma Virus?” his head shook and he found himself backing away from his desk with shock as though it was somehow infected. “He can’t. He can’t do that, Romana! That virus. There’s no cure. No antidote. No inoculation.” He panted a couple of breaths and dropped his forehead into his hand. “That virus should have died centuries ago. Gallifrey was supposed to be cured. How can he possibly have gotten his hands on that?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But it’s clearly here on Estrail.” She swallowed. “Narvin. There are thousands upon thousands of casualties here. Brax and Leela have encountered many of the Zombies of our fallen… so many of them.”

“If that virus somehow escapes Estrail and comes to Gallifrey. Romana. That’ll wipe out every last remaining Time Lord on this planet.”

“The Doctor is working on a cure with Lord Phiroi of Oakdown.”

“Phiroi?” he asked. “He’s been missing for centuries. Long since been thought dead to the War. He’s alive?”

“He’s been working with us since the fall of Southern Gallifrey.”

“We could have used him on the front lines here.”

“In a way, you were,” she answered. “But this isn’t the time for that discussion, Narvin. Right now, I need to know not only how Rassilon was able to resurrect the Dogma virus, but how we can possibly…” She exhaled almost to a whimper. “We need to end this. By the Gods, Narvin. You should see what he has done here, and how many of our people have fallen to it so needlessly. And for what reason? For what reason do they need to die like this?”

“You have the human with you” he asked after a moment. “The Doctor’s mate, Rose.” He looked to the door, not really waiting for an answer, but wanting a moment to think. “Rassilon is of the belief that whatever you have on your hands down there, she is able to counter off. I don’t know why or how, but he’s become very curious as to how Braxiatel intends on wielding her power to do it.”

She let out a laugh. “Not even Brax knows that,” she shot back. “I don’t think the thought has crossed his mind, to be honest. He’s protecting her, not trying to pull a trigger on her.”

“When I left Rassilon,” he advised her darkly. “He was intrigued as to what she would do. He believes she has a power of sorts inside her.” He exhaled. “So you’d best hope he’s right.” He then winced. “Or hope he’s wrong. If she’s got the power he believes she had, he’ll destroy the universe to get to her and take her as his own little science experiment.”

“She does,” she admitted. “But enough inside her to fight against the howling souls of ten thousand regenerations? I don’t know.”

He exhaled a long breath. “Is she susceptible to the virus? Is any part of her Time Lord enough that she can become contaminated and…” he gulped. He didn’t want to finish that thought.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “She has links with capsules; the Doctor’s TARDIS, Brax’s capsule, Phiroi’s. I don’t know if that means she has the nuclei that the virus attacks.”

“She won’t be able to return to her home, her children, and the refugees until they’ve found a cure.” He swallowed. “Which means the Doctor will work hard to find a cure. I shouldn’t feel relief about that, Romana. But I do. The chance that we can fight this virus and put an end to that threat indefinitely – it’s worth it.” He exhaled. “And I can’t find it in me to feel terrible about that. I can’t. I know I should, but…”

“I understand,” she admitted almost painfully. “I feel the same way. The Doctor… If anyone can find a cure and save our people, _he_ can.” 

He cleared his throat with a cough and looked up at the ceiling. “You’re risking a Human life to get the Doctor on side, Romana.”

“I didn’t know,” she assured him. “Had I known what was out there, I would never have sent her. I would never have allowed Braxiatel to go in there, either.”

“And as usual, he’s in the thick of it.” He sniffed and dropped his chin to his chest. “Look. I’ll see what I can find out from here for you, and whether or not this is the only planet that Rassilon’s doing this to. I expect so, as a project of this magnitude, and this much collateral damage to our people, it has to be contained.”

“How upset is Rassilon?”

Narvin snorted. “He’s quiet. Not exploding…”

“By the Gods, he’s livid, then.”

“Exactly,” Narvin agreed gravely. “So keep yourself out of sight. Bad enough that Braxiatel and Leela are within sight of this. If you or the Doctor step in, things here on Gallifrey may become apocalyptic with his fury.” He sniffed. “He refuses to accept the constant hallway whispers and comparisons toward your former leadership of Gallifrey.” He smiled. “And just how much of a golden age Gallifrey was in…”

“Until it wasn’t,” Romana argued lightly. “The destruction of Gallifrey began under my watch, don’t forget that.”

“Its resurrection came under your watch as well,” he looked toward his door, and an urgently flashing mauve light on a panel at its side. “But I must go now. I have someone on approach. Best I don’t get caught talking to you.”

“Understood,” she breathed out. “And Narvin. Please be safe.”

“As Leela says: Where is the fun in that?” He thumbed to disconnect the call and quickly dropped it into a drawer of his desk. The door hissed and then opened with a lazer-like hum. 

Rassilon stood in the doorway, his expression was dark and furious. “Coordinator Narvinectralonum…”

~~oooOOOooo~~

The Doctor was unable to stop the rush he had toward the towering inferno of howling souls and rushing winds. He felt himself caught up by the draft of it, and by his desperate need to stop his wife from being torn apart inside the winds of time.

He was close enough to catch her. His arm thrust forward, his fingertips brushed against the hood of her jumper, but he was unable to clutch at it. Unable to grasp and stop her as she was caught by the wind and pulled into the spiral of winds.

He wasn’t going to lose her. Not to this. He would follow her into death if need be. To regenerate or not, that wasn’t even a question – he wouldn’t go on in a universe in which she didn’t exist. He closed his eyes and prepared to feel himself launch up off the ground.

There was a hard yank on the back of his orange space suit, and he found himself thrown a remarkable distance back from the funnel. He flew through the air and landed hard on his backside. His back and head hit the ground shortly after his butt hit the ground and he lay there for a moment in an attempt to catch his breath and his bearings. When he moaned and finally looked up, he found himself under the furious stare of his big brother.

“You absolute, reckless, idiot fool,” Braxiatel yelled out sharply. “Do you ever think before you act, Thete?”

“Think?” he snapped back with equal sharpness in his tone as he rocked up to a seat on the concrete. He thrust an arm upward toward the funnel. “What is there to think about except to get to her; to pull my wife out of a guaranteed death at the hands of _that_?”

“Plenty, if you had half a brain capable of actual thought,” Braxiatel shot back.

“You were the one who told me to stop her!” he growled. “I was doing what you _told_ me to do.”

“I did not say get yourself killed in the process, you _idiot_.” He brought the butts of both hands up to press against the visor that still covered his face. “Even _you_ have to know there’s an end-point to when stopping her is actually possible to achieve.”

“And if it was Romana going in there,” he argued. “Would you have stopped; or would you have killed yourself going in there after her?”

“Don’t bring her into this.”

“At least I still have regenerations to count on,” he growled as he pulled to his knees and slowly drew to a shaking stand. “You, on the other hand, don’t.”

“With _that_ ,” he said with a thrust of his hand toward the funnel. “Do you think regeneration is actually possible; or will every one of them you have left end up floating into _that_ vortex with the rest of them?”

“There’s one way to find out, isn’t there?” he challenged with a snarl.

“I know it’s a hard ask, Thete, but for once in your lives, don’t be a complete imbecile.”

Leela let out a growl of her own. “How about the two of you save your yelling at each other for later. Rose is in that tornado and so we should start to plan how to get her out of there before she is torn apart.”

Both men immediately shut their mouths, but their glares remained solidly argumentative toward each other as they shared a look and then looked toward the funnel. The image before the three of them was horrific. Rose’s body was being tossed around the outer edges of the funnel, her arms and legs flailing helplessly against the winds. Despite the violence within the funnel, however, she didn’t seem to be in any particular state of duress of fear. If anything, she appeared to be focused toward the centre of the funnel, to where there were no winds nor howling faces to push at her. Her body twisted and spun against the winds. Her arms and legs flicked and splayed against the wind, but her face was locked into the very centre. No matter how much she was thrown, or how many times she spun in the winds, her gaze remained in place like a dancer on the stage spotting her pirouettes. 

A dark figure rose within the centre of the funnel. A shifting blob that slowly rose up from the ground that twisted and turned to finally resemble a humanoid figure. He turned in the centre of the tornado, keeping time with the woman being thrown about around him. Once perfect synch to her movement was found, he lifted an arm toward her and caught her hand in his. With a hard tug, he pulled Rose from the whip of the wild winds and into the calm centre. She was well above his head when she broke through the wall and fell heavily onto the concrete floor at his feet. She held at her lower back and let out a sharp cry of pain.

The Doctor stepped quickly forward with the blind intention to step in and intervene in some way. He found himself held back by the hard grasp of his brother.

“Don’t,” he warned him. “She’s okay.”

“She is not,” he countered with a hiss through his teeth as he watched the stranger within the tornado merely drop a hand in offer to aid her to a stand. She just lifted her head toward him. There was obvious hurt in her expression toward the man and she didn’t accept his offer to help her to a stand. “God, Brax, even you can’t be that blind to it.” 

“I’m not,” he growled. “But I’m also not idiot enough to think that killing myself will help her in any way right now.”

The Doctor held himself in a furious slouch. He held his gloved hands in fists at his side. His head was deep inside his shoulders, and with the blue light of his visor ghosting the angled features in his face, he looked every bit as livid as he felt. 

Inside the funnel, Rose finally drew herself to a shaking and pained stand. The figure that stood before her held out his arms to help her find balance against the winds that still whipped at the backs of her legs and shoulders. He held her arms with a gentle firmness and lowered his face to speak to her. He was unheard by anyone else, but the attention that Rose had on him, and her slowly warming posture of affection toward him, confirmed that he wasn’t any threat toward her at all.

In a moment, she lifted up onto her toes and threw her arms around his neck. He pressed his lips to the very centre of her forehead and held her loosely in place.

“Who is he?” he asked with a sneer. 

“Who?”

“That man,” he clarified. “Who is he.”

“Me,” Braxiatel answered with a deep inhale. “He should have been two bodies from now – if my own records of who I was supposed to be is accurate.”

“You’re naked,” he said with displeasure. 

“It does appear that I am, doesn’t it?”

“And you’re kissing my wife.”

“Just be thankful she isn’t looking down,” he muttered with an indignant sniff. “Or she might get a pretty good indicator of what she’s missing.”

“Not exactly the time,” he growled in reply.

“Should we be trying to go ion after her?” Leela asked worriedly. “I do not feel that she is in safe hands.”

Braxiatel shot her a look from across the chest of his brother. “She is in _my_ hands, Leela.”

“Then I shall repeat my concern that Rose is not in safe hands right now.” Around her legs the two wolves marched their white paws into the ground. The tikka tikka of their sharpened claws on the concrete was loud enough to be heard over the din. It made each member of the party flinch with each sound.

“Trust me,” he begged in order. “I obviously know what I’m doing.”

“If there is one that I do not trust, Braxiatel, it is you,” she countered with a look.

“You were the one that let her go in there, Leela.” He gestured to the underneath of his chin. “You held a knife at my throat and told me to trust myself with her…”

“Yes,” she replied. “I told you to trust yourself. I did not say that I held that same trust in you.”

He rolled his eyes and looked back to the funnel, shocked to see his future self now holding Rose’s face in his hands as he spoke to her. His expression was one of urging, of pleading, and urgency. Rose merely nodded her head with each shift and turn of his lips.

“Never before have I wanted to be able to read lips,” the Doctor muttered. “Eight Billion languages, and that’s not one of them.”

“He’s asking for her to give him trust,” Leela translated softly. “In much larger words, of course. I do not wish to repeat all of what is a private talk between brother and sister, but he is saying that there is only one way to save every one of them.” She looked toward the Doctor. “Only one way to save herself as well.”

“Which is?” he asked worriedly.

“I do not know,” she admitted. She looked to Braxiatel. “Do you know?”

He shook his head slowly. “I really don’t.” His eyes were locked on the couple inside the centre of the funnel, and the kind expression on the face of his elder incarnation toward a woman who was almost a full foot shorter than he was. The figure settled his fingers against her temples and looked directly toward Braxiatel with an expression of anger and warning.

“There’s no way to take cover,” Braxiatel murmured in warning. “But I have a feeling that’s exactly what I’m asking us to do right now.” He shook a hand toward Leela. “I have enough strength that I can brace you,” he offered. “So come here.”

“I do not think so,” she answered him indignantly. “I can stand on my own, thank you Braxiatel.”

“As you wish.” He looked back into the funnel and twisted his feet on the concrete to try and gain himself some heavy traction against whatever was about to come for the three of them. “Get ready. Thete…?”

The Doctor strode closer to the funnel and prepared himself to rush in if necessary. “Yeah. Ready,” he said as he stamped and scraped his feet to find tighter purchase on the concrete himself. “Come on, Rose,” he breathed out through teeth grit hard in preparation on what was to come. “I’m right here. I’ll catch you…”

The elder Braxiatel gave a nod toward his younger self, then closed his eyes and turned his head back toward the woman who waited under his hands. He curled a lip and lowered his chin to her, then grit his teeth as he forged a violent connection of minds. Rose clutched and clawed at his wrists and let out an almost immediate agonised cry of pain. She was not brought to her knees, instead she seemed to straighten up and even levitate off the ground until she was equal in height to him. Once level with him, her cries ceased and her eyes flashed open with a light of amber that rivalled the twisting and turning power that surrounded them.

At that moment, the chest of the man within the funnel contracted tightly and he was drawn backward into the wild winds of the tornado once more. Rose still hovered just off the ground as the calm centre of the funnel began to contract and fill with the howling regenerative souls of thousands of unlived incarnations. While she didn’t cry out and yell, her shoulders pitched and her back arched as face after face ran upon and through her. Over and over again she was struck and howled at in a repeated and relentless attack until finally, her body could handle no more. Her feet touched the floor to put her into a leaned and almost despondent slouch to one side. Her hands shook at her side as they slowly curled into fists. Her head lifted slowly. Her eyes, and the power of the huon within them burned a hot amber, and with one last strike from an errant howling face, Rose’s mouth dropped open and she released a long and powerful howl into the winds that rushed around her.

Her fists shifted to straighten into flatten palms and she turned them at her hip to hold her palms outward toward the three people who waited for her on the other side of the wall. Her eyes were clearly unfocused, but they did seem to lock on the man in the orange space suit. With a deep inhale that pulled her chest almost completely upward, Rose let out a long and strangled cry that carried with it an horrific shockwave of power that blew outward from her chest to flatten everything in its path.

Braxiatel fought hard against the shockwave, and leaned forward against it to remain on his feet like one would against a large towering wave of water at the beach. He forced a stride forward, and then another, and although he wasn’t able to move forward even an inch, he did manage to stay on his feet. He finally lost his footing as a secondary wave of glistening golden amber slammed hard into his chest with enough force to lift him off the ground completely and throw him back at least twenty feet in the air. His own eyes flashed golden for a brief moment and a puff of glistening and golden air exploded from between his lips as he finally struck ground and rolled across the floor to finally end up with his back up against a large chunk of fallen concrete.

The Doctor’s own focus held him firmly in place against the blast of the shockwave. He felt the sudden and tight grip of his former companion around his waist as she struggled not to be thrown. He held at Leela’s hands to hold her firm and in safety and leaned forward to give her shelter against the winds. 

The blast itself was violent and powerful, but it was short lived and over quickly. He looked up toward the small rounded platform that had held the tornado in place and saw Rose still hovering at least three feet off the ground. In the air she swayed slowly at the neck and shoulders, and very quickly it was clear that whatever force was holding her off the ground was dissipating quickly.

The Doctor shoved Leela’s arms off his waist and rushed forward. He stumbled over a chunk of concrete, but caught himself well enough that he was able to skid along the platform in a feet first base-stealing slide to put himself underneath her as she finally fell to the ground.

Rose collided hard with his legs and chest with clear grunt and whimper. She let herself lay against his heaving orange chest for a moment to catch her own breath until she was finally able to speak out two syllables in question. 

“Doctor?”

“I’ve got you,” he panted out. He finally let his helmeted head drop backward to exhale in relief. “I’ve always got you.”

Rose lifted her chin up off his chest and looked into his face with a wince of apology. She then looked toward Leela, who has staggering her own steps, supported by the gentle nudges of the two wolves who seemed to be the only ones who seemed unaffected by this. Her eyes then shifted toward her brother in law and she let out a gasp.

He was on his hands and knees, his face down toward the ground. His chest contracted with loud retches until finally he shoved himself up to rise to his knees. He swayed in place and looked to her with eyes as brightly lit as the tornado had been.

Rose called to him with panic and urgency and scrambled to get up from the Doctor’s chest and his protective hold.

“Stay back,” Braxiatel demanded with a thrust of his glowing hand toward her. “I’m not safe… Not right now.”

“What’s wrong?” Rose asked the Doctor with panic. “What’s happening to him?”

“I think,” he answered with upset on his features. “I think he’s regenerating. But how…?”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	28. Regener-ombie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax goes through a ... regeneration... Rose taunts the Devil.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's Canada Day tomorrow, so I'm afraid this must tie you over until Thursday. 
> 
> Didn't get anywhere near what I wanted to get done today... But I got the hard bit over with. 
> 
> Lots of stuff will happen next chapter, I promise.
> 
> I do hope that you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

The console room of Braxiatel’s capsule had a thick air of uncertainty and worry inside it. Only Romana and Andred still remained on board. Neither of the two of them were ones that were willing to remain behind in any situation. They were action-takers, not content to sit back and watch. To see the ones that their hearts beat for in the midst of absolute and horrific danger cut them both to the bone.

More times than once, they had to stop each other from running out of the capsule doors to leap into the fray to protect their beloveds. They both knew that to do so would be nothing more than pointless suicide.

“Can you at least pilot us to the location?” Andred queried quietly. He was clearly battling to suppress his panic. Although he knew beyond a doubt that Leela was more than capable of protecting herself with vicious fervor, he couldn’t help but feel protective of his mate.

“It’s for the best that I don’t,” she answered softly. “The Doctor’s already there, and I’m sure…”

“So it’s fine for him to step in and help,” Andred snarled angrily. “To be the saviour to his mate, and yet we are held back like cowards.”

“He shouldn’t have gone, either,” she bit in reply. “But to stop him doing anything is an impossibility. You should know that.” She spared him a furious look. “You married a woman who is just as bullheaded and unlikely to take orders as he is.”

“I do honour and admire her strong spirit, Romana,” he said with a sigh and a look through his brows at the monitor feed. “But there are times when my hearts wish she would be less …” he exhaled. “That she would allow me to stand as her protector, rather than standing always as mine.”

“It was what drew you to her,” She pressed gently. “Because she was so self assured, brave, and a warrior for not only herself and her people, but to all who need her wisdom and her protection.”

“I admit that it was because of that that my hearts fell for her as immediately as they did,” he admitted. “Because she was so beautifully dangerous and indelicate. I offered her my devotion and pleaded her hand before the fall of night on our first meeting.”

“When a Gallifreyan finds their mate,” she breathed out. “It _can_ be that immediate.”

“Not so for you and Braxiatel,” he suggested. “You played the long game – despite his obvious affection toward you.”

“My Hearts beat for him no less for it,” she said with a sigh. “I fought it. I did. How could I bind myself to a man who personifies deceit and betrayal in the way that he does?”

“The hearts know,” he answered. “Even if we don’t.”

“The hearts are cruel,” she said with a growl. “To bind me to a man I constantly fear I am going to lose one day – if not to his incessant running away, but to his need to put himself in harm’s way…”

“More often than not to protect _you_ ,” he reminded her. “And it always has been for that reason, Romana. Don’t forget that his hearts beat for you with the same fierce passion that yours do for him.”

“Then he needs to prove that to me,” she snarled. “He needs to stay home with me. He needs to settle down, love me, sire me children…” her hands flew to her mouth and her eyes widened with shock at her admission. “ _Children_. Did I just say that?”

“Throw that request across the bond,” he remarked with a chuckle. “And he’ll be mate guarding in an instant. It’s all he’s wanted with you for the past half a millennium, but instead he’s remained silent on the subject to stand with you in second place behind war and politics.” He glanced at the monitor. “Forced to vicariously through his brother and his wife to help raise those children as if his own because he feels he’ll never have the chance for himself.”

“I never knew.” She pressed the butts of her hands to her eyes. “I never knew he wanted it. I never knew how much _I_ wanted it … until now.”

“With all due respect of course, but you are very much as selfish to your own needs as he is a slave to his deceptive practices.” He shuffled lightly in place and folded his arms across his chest. His eyes were still locked hard on the monitor ahead of them, and of the trio of individuals watching helplessly as Rose fought against the forces within the tornado. “Both of you have been selfish and unyielding toward your own needs. And you shouldn’t be, Romana. Connect with your mate properly, forge a deeper contact than either of you are allowing right now. The Good, the bad, and the very ugly of the both of you… stop shielding and start sharing.”

She rolled her eyes in a forced manner. “You and Leela. Have you taken up marriage counselling of late?”

“Battling our own demons,” he said with a shrug. “As you do. Leela forces openness, and it works to strengthen our union. Perhaps you should try it as well.”

“A hard ask of a Time Lord.”

“Who said marriage is easy?”

“Especially when you’re married to one of them,” she agreed with a sigh and a glance toward both Braxiatel and the Doctor. “Menaces toward the hearts, the both of them.”

“Show me a Time Lord that isn’t,” he said with a sigh. “At least one within this grouping at any rate. What I did to Leela …” His head lowered with regret. “We are all a menace toward the hearts of the ones we love, it seems.” His eyes flashed wide, and then clenched shut as the monitors blew up with light so brilliant, both Romana and Andred lifted their arms to shield them from the brightness of it. “What in the name of Omega?”

“Ignition of the Huon inside Rose,” Romana said gravely. “By the Gods, he actually did it.”

“Who, and what did he do?” Andred barked out as he dropped his arm heavily to his side. 

“Just wait,” she answered with a lift of her hand. “I want to see what happens.”

The feed from Braxiatel’s camera was down at the ground and shook with puffs of golden breath obscuring the feed. Leela’s camera was off centre as well, shaking side to aide as she tried hard to get her bearings. The only cameras with any focus toward Rose and the tornado of doom were those attached to the shoulders of the two wolves. They shifted side to side with an obvious marching of their feet on the ground but were focused on the quickly dissipating tornado as the howling souls escaped their confines to rush across the planet.

Rose hovered in the air; her head hung low. The winds and souls that buffeted her body were no longer surrounding her, neither was the incarnation of the man who had drawn the power from her. She was alone and exhausted, held in the air by the will of the universe alone. It wasn’t until the orange-clad body of the Doctor skidded below her on his back that she dropped down to the ground to fall chest upon chest with her worried Time Lord.

Romana’s eyes focused on the camera feed provided by Braxiatel. Her hearts hammered with worry inside her chest as he was clearly retching toward the ground. In amongst the glittering motes that were scattered across the screen, she could see droplets of deep orange and crimson blood forming a small puddle on the concrete.

“He’s hurt,” she managed out.

“Badly, as well,” Andred agreed. “Whatever damage he’s sustained, Romana. It’s internal.” He pointed to Leela’s feed; her line of sight locked on the heaving form of Braxiatel. “I can’t see anything obvious.”

“He can’t regenerate,” Romana said gravely. She could feel the heated burn of tears forming in her eyes. “Oh, please tell me it’s not a fatal injury.”

“Move us,” Andred demanded sharply. “Get us to him, and we can pilot him back to the house, to Phiroi.”

“I can’t,” she said with a waver in her voice. “If he’s infected, Andred. If there’s even a chance…” She looked to him with defeat and agony in her gaze. “We can’t take him back.”

“So, you’ll let him die?” he barked angrily. “Your mate? You’ll let him suffer and _die_?”

“Oh Irving. I’m so sorry.” Her voice was barely audible. “I have no other choice. My hearts, though, they’re…”

She swallowed her words when the feed showed him levering himself up onto his knees to slouch backward. Five cameras showed the hot golden glow that had become his eyes, and the straightness of warning in his tone as he demanded that Rose stay back; that he was too dangerous for her to tend to right now.

The glow in his hand, and the patchy shimmer of gold shifting across his body gave Romana hope that perhaps he could regenerate through this and become a new man…

…And then it drew horror to realise that if he had become infected while on the planet, he’d change to something else entirely.

She felt her hearts breaking inside her chest when he shoved his helmet off his head and it became clear that full regenerative power hadn’t been restored. Only patches of his neck, face, and head glowed golden. The rest of the skin she could see was darkening toward green.

“…My hearts, Irving, they’re breaking.”

She fell hard to her knees on the console room floor and called out her horror inside a long cry of his name.

~~oooOOOooo~~

“ _Stay back,_ ” he’d told her. “ _I’m not safe_ … _Not right now_ ”

Rose could argue until she was blue about how nothing about him was ever safe. Not really. But right now, her mind was far more focused on the very real possibility that Brax was going to regenerate. Ordinarily, she’d be horrified to know that any of her friends or family had gotten themselves into such peril that a regeneration was necessary to begin with. But right now. At this very instant. She couldn’t be more glad to see the golden fires of regeneration course across his skin…

…What little of it she could actually see, of course.

Braxiatel took a look at his hands, and the glow of his fingers through his fingerless gloves. With rapid movements, he removed the gloves completely to look upon both hands with awe in his eyes. His helmet was forcibly removed next and tossed aside like yesterday’s rubbish. He wore a smile of hope and looked toward his brother and Rose with an expression of relief.

“I’m gonna be right here,” Rose promised him with a bark in her voice. She was finally on her feet and made a slow approach toward him. She petted her chest and gave him a nod of encouragement. “When it’s over. Right here, yeah?”

The Doctor took a sudden and very tight hold of her upper arm to prevent her moving any closer toward her brother in law. She looked down at his hand, and the way his fingers dug into her skin, and then back up at him. “Doctor?” she queried with a deep furrow in her brow. “Bit tight, yeah?”

“Something’s wrong,” he muttered by way of explanation. 

“What?”

He looked to her with worry in his eyes. “The regeneration. Something’s going wrong.”

She looked toward Braxiatel, still on his knees on the concrete. His skin – the little that was exposed to them – wasn’t completely engulfed in the enzyme that would typically trigger a complete regeneration. Instead, he wore patches of gold only on parts of his face, his neck, his hands and his head. Any part of him not covered in the golden motes of regeneration started to wither and wrinkle and shifting colouring between sickly blue-green and black.

“What’s happening to him?” Rose asked with panic. Oh, she wasn’t stupid. She could see exactly what was happening, but she needed the Doctor to tell her that she was wrong, that Braxiatel wasn’t shifting from handsome Time Lord into a creepy, ugly zombie.

“Braxiatel has been infected,” Leela answered gravely. There was genuine upset in her voice. “He is to become one of the creatures we had to kill in the forest. Romana. I am sorry.”

“No,” Rose cried out as she struggled against the Doctor’s hold to get to Braxiatel. “Not him. Not Brax. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Rose,” the Doctor breathed against her ear. His face was set in a wince against the efforts of Rose trying to pull away from him, and of the heartbreak that his brother was doomed to stagger across this world sentenced to a living death. “I’m so sorry.”

“Brax!” Rose called out. “Fight it. You have to fight the virus. You can regenerate properly; I know you can. You have to!”

“He can’t,” the Doctor advised her sadly. “The virus … it’s too strong for him to fight.”

“I will kill him,” Leela offered quietly. “To spare Braxiatel this curse. Let him die as he should.”

“You’ll have to kill me first,” Rose snarled at her. 

“It is for the best, Rose,” she reminded her kindly. “To walk the lands without a mind and without the beat of his hearts inside his chest. That is not a death that Braxiatel would want.”

“Help me,” Braxiatel begged in with a scraping voice toward the Doctor. Half of his face was withered and worn, the other still full of life and colour. One of his eyes was still a vibrant brown, the other black, and while he stood tall in front of them all, his gait as he moved slightly forward was dragged and limping. “Thete. You have to …” He let out a cry as both hands shot up to his hairline. One fist clutched hair that was still a vibrant honey blonde, the other pulled a tuft of blackened hair out in a chunk.

Leela raised her blade. “I will end this,” she snarled. “Braxiatel will not end up as one of those creatures.”

Soliarn shifted around in a circle in front of her. There was clear confusion in his piercing blue eyes as he looked between Braxiatel and Leela. He sniffed at the air and issued a long humph toward his mistress’ protector and then turned toward Leela with threat inside his eyes. He leaned back into his haunches in a threatening posture, issuing a warning snarl.

“You will not stop me,” she warned the wolf. “Braxiatel must be given an honourable death.”

Rose looked toward the human and the animal warriors. She knew that the both of them would fight this to the death and she wouldn’t allow it.

“Run!” she cried out to her brother in law. “Please, Brax. Run!”

The half zombie, half Time Lord looked up at her with hurt and confusion inside his gaze.

“Well fix this,” she promised him inside a yell as she continued to struggle hard against the Doctor’s firm and unrelenting hold. “I’ll find you, and we’ll fix you. I promise. Just please. God, Brax, run!”

With a nod and a grunt, he turned and fled quickly through a wide crack in the towering wall that had once stood in the face of the tornado. He disappeared quickly into the thick, dense forest; out of sight to all of them.

“Rose!” Leela admonished with a yell. “You do not know what you have done.”

“I know exactly what I did,” she replied with a growl. “I was saving Brax.”

“That is not saving him, Rose,” she snarled in reply. “That is condemning him to a death without honour.” She looked toward the crack in the wall. “I will find him,” she vowed. “And I will give him the death he deserves.”

Rose glared at her. “No you won’t. I won’t let you.” She looked to her wolf. “Soliarn!” Rose called sharply. “Protect him. Protect your uncle. Go!”

Soliarn snorted a thick sound and didn’t even look back toward his mate as he took off through the crack in the wall to make chase after Braxiatel.

Rose looked to Leela with challenge in her eye as she finally found her freedom from the Doctor’s arms. “You are a good warrior with a deadly blade, but not even _you_ can take down a fully grown Dahrama.”

“Doctor,” Leela snapped toward the Time Lord, who was slumped in defeat. “You can not tell me that you will allow this.”

“He’s as much alive as he seems dead,” Rose argued. “The parts of him that live, they’ll keep him alive….”

“I’m afraid not,” the Doctor answered with a quiet sigh. “Death spreads quickly, Rose. It won’t take long for the infection to spread and for that change to take hold completely…” he swallowed with a wince. “And turn him into one of _them_.”

She curled one hand under her nose to cover her mouth and brought the other one up as a fist under her chin. There was a sob in the back of her throat as she curled into herself. “He’s still in there, Doctor. I know he is.”

Although proper affection was limited because of his cumbersome space suit, he curled an arm across her shoulder and pulled her into his chest. There was no way he could set his chin on her head, so he made do with stroking her hair instead. “He’s gone, Rose. I’m sorry.”

“I killed him,” she realised painfully. “God, Doctor. This was my fault. I killed him.”

“No, you didn’t,” he vowed passionately. “This is _not_ your fault.”

“Yes it was,” she corrected him as she pulled out of his arms and strode to look down at the small puddle of Braxiatel’s blood. “He was thrown by my blast.” She snapped her head to look back at him. “Because I went against what he wanted – what _you_ wanted – and went inside that funnel. He wouldn’t have been caught up in it if I didn’t go in there.”

“what ifs, Rose,” he said with light exasperation. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

“So is this what I do then?” She pleaded out. “Kill the men I love most in the universe? First you, and now Brax?” She walked toward him with horror in her eyes. “Is Mark next?”

“You didn’t kill me,” he corrected. “I did that to myself..”

“Because of _me_ ,” she reminded him. “To protect _me_.” She thrust her arm toward the crack. “And now him…”

“To protect everyone,” he snapped with frustration. “To save the pain and torture of thousands of Time Lords. Not to save you. If anything, Rose, he _used_ you. Like he uses _everyone_.”

“Calm your words, Doctor,” Leela warned him. “Do not let your grief cause further harm. This is not the fault of Braxiatel. It is not the fault of Rose. Put the blame in the hands of the one who deserves it.”

“And who’s that?” the Doctor asked with a drawl and a wide roll of his tongue behind his teeth. There was definite sorrow inside his posture, which stained his voice as well as the stretch of his words. He drew in a shaking breath and swatted aimlessly at the air to cry and capture his wife for comfort to stop the tears that were damming hard against his lashes. 

Leela waited until Rose had walked into the Doctor’s arms and pressed herself against his chest to answer the question. 

“Rassilon,” she answered finally. “This is all Rassilon.”

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~

Romana didn’t need to hear the conversation over the feed to know that the situation was grave. She saw the reality of it long before the Doctor, Rose, and Leela had seen it. Irving Braxiatel was dead. 

There would be no coming back from this. There couldn’t be. She’d seen the devastation that the virus left in its wake back on Gallifrey. There was no coming back from being zombified. There was no cure. As much faith as she held in the Doctor and his brilliant mind, she was beginning to doubt that even he’d be able to discover a cure before it was too late.

Romana had fallen to her knees in anguish almost immediately upon seeing the halted regeneration of her husband. Andred had crouched at her side almost immediately to offer comfort, which she had politely waved off. Right now, he was seated in a lotus position less than an arms length away from her, playing with the wolf cub in his lap, ready to offer her comfort if she felt the need for it.

She had since shifted to sit on her hip in a lean on the console of Braxiatel’s now grief-stricken ship. Her tears were falling fast down her cheeks, but she found herself unable to dissolve completely into sobbing or weeping. She couldn’t. She knew that Braxiatel would be mortified to know she was in any such state of being.

“He’s gone,” she said finally to Andred. “And this time, he won’t be coming back to me.”

Andred nodded slowly. While this would be an opportunity to offer up plenty of empty platitudes to try and make her feel better, it was an insult to the both of them to even try it. Instead he spoke out a loud prayer for her fallen husband. He was only marginally surprised that she didn’t softly whisper it along with him.

“We need to finish what it was that the both of you started,” he said finally. “To honour him.”

“Brax and honour,” she said with a rueful laugh. “Two words that don’t belong in the same sentence.” She wanted to keep laughing, but only managed to drop her face into her hands and dissolve completely into tears. “how do I move on without him, Andred? He’s been at my side, my adviser, my confidant, my protector, and then my husband for most of my life.” Her shoulders shook and she inhaled a shaking breath. “Even when he wasn’t within reach, he was still there in one way or another.”

“And he still will be, Romana,” he assured her. “His spirit lives, and it always will.”

A little wet nose sniffed up the length of her forearm, and Romana took her hands from her face to look into the concerned blue eyes of Neroli. “You sound like Leela,” she remarked softly to Andred as she leaned backward to let the young pup pad his way over her legs. He looked up into her solemn and sad face, then lifted his nose and let out a sympathetic, broken howl.

“Sometimes – well, more often than not – Leela’s right,” he said with a smile. “She can come across as whimsical at times, I’ll admit, but sweep away the sugar, and what she says makes perfect sense.”

She stroked the head and ears of the cub, smiling at the broken and pathetic little howling. “She does, doesn’t she?” She looked to him. “I’m glad you and Leela are here right now. I don’t know if I could do this without you.”

Andred’s eyes were wide with horror on the monitors in front of them, and of the image of Rose with her face in a fallen surveillance camera. His voice took on a low and almost grave tone to it. “By all that is holy, Doctor, why are you letting her do that?”

“What is she doing?”

“The last thing anyone should do,” he answered. “”She’s issuing a challenge to Rassilon.”

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~

When Leela assigned blame to Rassilon, Rose lifted her head from the Doctor’s chest. The Sevateem warrior was right. She was one-hundred present right. If Rassilon hadn’t pulled together this absolute abomination in the first place, then Braxiatel wouldn’t have felt compelled to investigate. He wouldn’t have needed to land on this God-forsaken planet filled with zombies and dead time capsules. He wouldn’t have been infected by a virus thought long extinct.

She wouldn’t have needed to step into a tornado of pain and suffering to let his future incarnation force her to become a weapon…

…or the Antidote, as future Brax had called her. Whatever that meant.

With steadying hands, she pressed against the Doctor’s chest and levered herself away from him. The pads of her fingers petted at each of his hearts for a moment, and then she stepped from him completely.

His hands chased after her in a weakened and non-urgent manner. It was more a gesture of affection than actual need right now, and once out of his reach, he simply let his hands drop numbly at his sides.

“Rose,” he breathed out gently. “We should go into the TARDIS. Get far away from here.”

“Not without him,” she answered without looking at him. Her eyes dances across the ground through the debris left in the wake of her huon blast. “Soliarn and Brax aren’t being left behind.”

“It’s too late,” he assured her tiredly. “We can call back Soliarn, but I’m afraid that Brax is beyond our help now.”

“I’m not giving up, Doctor,” she said to him. 

“I understand,” he said brokenly. “And your bullheaded never give up nature is one of the things that I love so much about you. But sometimes, Hearts, we have to admit defeat.”

She sighed. “I know. You’re right.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “I-I won’t fight you on it anymore. I’ll come back with you,” she vowed. “But I have to do one thing first.”

“What’s that?” his voice held relief.

She spied what was one a small polished smoked glass camera dome and gave a smile. “There you are,” she stated firmly as she picked it up and pulled the small recording device from within. Holding it inside the palm of her hand, she held the device upward as though taking a selfie picture on her phone.

“Hello in there,” she declared with a forced and broad smile on her face and a chipper tone in her voice. She then tapped her finger on the lens. “I know there’s someone watching back home on Gallifrey. So I wonder if you might send word to his Supreme Lord Arsehole Rassilon.”

The Doctor’s eyes shot wide with horror. “Rose! What are you doing?”

She flicked her head to him. She had one brow lifted high on her forehead and a half smile on her face. “If this gigantic Lord Jackarse wants to fuck around with my family, Doctor, then he’s going to have to face me head-on.”

“You really don’t understand what you’re starting here,” he said with panic. He looked around him as though expecting the arrival of a full battle fleet of capsules at any moment. “Rassilon is not a man you want to poke at, Rose.”

“Neither are you, or Brax, or any of us,” she reminded him. “And he’s gone and done that, right?”

He lifted his eyes to the top of his helmet. “True.”

“And do you honestly think that your coward President, who sends in everyone else to do his dirty work, who kills his own people without thought, who resurrects an extinct virus that has no cure to kill his own, will actually grow a set big enough to come down here himself?” 

“Not a particularly pleasant image, Rose,” he said with a shrug. “But you’re right, of course.”

“Of course I am,” she agree with a wink in her eye. The smile she held on her face toward her husband fell very quickly as she shifted her eyes back to the camera. “You want _me_ , Lord Wankeron,” she challenged with a sneer. “Then come get me. I’m sure you know the temporal coordinates. Don’t take too long, I’m waiting.”

With a long growl that shifted into a grunt, Rose hurled the camera toward a fallen slab of concrete. It shattered on impact.

“Rose,” the Doctor breathed out with light frustration in his voice. “Can you please explain to me just why you felt it necessary to taunt Rassilon and challenge him to find you?”

“He does know where we are right now,” Leela agreed. “A direct challenge like that won’t bring his troops. It will bring him directly to you.”

“I hope so,” she admitted with a flat expression.

The Doctor frowned, utterly perplexed by her motive. “Why would you want that?”

“Because if he truly is as almighty as you lot keep thinkin’ he is and he actually shows up – then he’ll have an antidote on him, won’t he?” Her eyes glistened with hope. 

The Doctor tilted his head down to one side with regret. “Rose. There’s nothing we can do now. He’s gone. They’re all gone. I’m very sorry.”

“I’d listen to him if I were you,” Rassilon’s voice crooned in from behind her. “There is no possibility of a cure for this virus. I’ve made sure of it.” He exhaled with disappointment. “I didn’t want to risk any damage to the …” He looked with furious, yet guarded eyes toward the now silent platform. “ _Operation_ I had here.”

Rose gasped at the far too close proximity of his voice and spun quickly to face him. She let out a startled yelp of Braxiatel’s favourite Gallifreyan swear and staggered back a few steps to collide with the Doctor’s chest. He quickly slid himself in a low and guarded walk around her, keeping his wife held protectively behind him. At their side, Leela braced herself into a predatory stance that almost had her standing sideways to them. Her blades were in her hands and her eyes locked on target. At her side, a blue-white Gallifreyan wolf leaned back on her haunches ready to attack.

“Savage,” Rassilon said by way of greeting as he shifted his eyes from Leela and the wolf, and let his eyes trail across the group to finally fall upon the Doctor. “Lord Doctor.” He then looked at Rose, who peered at him through darkened eyes hiding underneath pinched brows.

“Hello Rose,” he said with a smirk and a raking look of contempt up and down her body. “You’re much smaller than I thought you’d be.”

“Don’t talk to her,” the Doctor warned darkly. “Don’t even look at her.”

“Who’s that?” she asked against the Doctor’s shoulder in a voice meant to be heard only by him.

Rassilon gave her a hardened glare. “I believe you called me Lord Wankeron,” he answered. “But most people call me his Supreme Lord President. Rassilon.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	29. Rassy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rassilon and team TARDIS (Sorry, Team: Braxiatel's Capsule) get into it a little

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was Canada Day yesterday. Which means some social-distancing BBQ's and beer on the patio while the neighbours set of fireworks that you hope to all isn't lit by drunken Canadians and gets accidentally aimed at your roof when they singe their fingers on the lighter .. I was - as a result - not in a particularly well state of being today. Three coffees and a sweet tea kind've drink that was handed to me by my son had little effect. I'm not 20 anymore... I keep forgetting that.
> 
> That said, I didn't quite get as much done as I had hoped. 
> 
> But I do hope that you enjoy this small offering today. I certainly hope it doesn't disappoint at all....

~~oooOOOooo~~

Having an audience with his Lord President wasn’t exactly an odd occurrence for Narvin. As Coordinator of the CIA, he was regularly called upon to attend meetings and discussions. He was hardly on a friendly or familiar level with the old man, but there was a certain level of respect shared between them…

…Fake though it may be on both their parts.

What _was_ odd, however, was the Lord President showing up at his office. Typically, he’d receive a polite summons and a Chancellery Guard escort to appear in the Presidential Office. Rassilon made people come to him – never would he lower himself to be the one to show up at someone else’s door.

“My Lord President,” he remarked with clear surprise. “To what do I owe the honour?” He made a show of looking to the window. “At this hour?”

“Narvin,” Rassilon said with a straightening in his shoulders. “If I may call you Narvin, of course.”

“You may,” he answered with a light tip in his head that was about the closest to any kind of bow he’d give the man. “My Lord President.”

“Rassilon,” he said with a wave of his hand, but no smile. “If I may enter.”

Narvin’s brow arched upward. There was a light sense of discomfort in the very back of his mind. Rassilon was Lord President, he didn’t need to ask permission to enter anyone’s office. He walked around his desk and swept his hand in the air with invitation. “Is there anything I can do for you, My Lord?”

“A pour of your strongest beverage,” he answered with a light lift in his nose. 

It was clearly spoken in jest rather than an actual request. Narvin could tell that alcohol was the very last thing his Lord President was looking for. He let out a long breath of apology. “Unfortunately, I don’t tend to partake in the consumption of foods or beverages that lead to inebriation of any form.” His eyes trailed after Rassilon as he wandered toward his desk – and to the gift basket send to him from Earth. He tried not to wince in worry. “I need complete control of my faculties at all times; such is the life of …”

“Of Gallifrey’s top spy,” he answered without looking at him. He ran his fingertip in a line along Narvin’s desk, through the spray of coffee beans littered on the desk. “And what is this?”

“My belief is that it is the organic compound which is the base of a hot beverage from Mutter’s Spiral,” he answered flatly. “A gift from former Cardinal Braxiatel.”

Rassilon flicked his head toward Narvin with frightening speed. There was a hot look of aggression inside his ancient glare. “A gift? Are you on friendly terms with Braxiatel?”

“Hardly,” he answered with a scoff. He flicked his hand toward the package with annoyance. “He knows that I am looking for him and his brother. He taunts me from time to time with a _gift_ – if you will – from his most recent location.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Last week he sent me a live eight-legged monstrosity from Sol-III called a Tarantula. Nearly stopped both of my hearts when it jumped out of the box.” He pointed to a small charred circle on the floor in the corner of the office. “You’ll see what remains of it over there. Dead or not, I’m not cleaning it up.”

Rassilon did shift his eyes to the charred stain on the otherwise pristine floor. “Full staser setting, Narvin? A little on the side of overkill, don’t you think, for an insect?”

“You didn’t see how big it was.”

Rassilon shifted his eyes back to Narvin. “I wouldn’t be too concerned about anymore gifts from Irving Braxiatel,” he said with a light smirk. “Our former Lord Cardinal is no longer a concern to any of us.”

Narvin held back the expression of horror he knew was trying to fall across his face. “And by that you mean?”

“He’s dead,” he answered simply. “You can remove Irving Braxiatel from your list of Lords I want found.”

“How?” Narvin asked within a whisper. 

“The method of his demise really is irrelevant,” he huffed in reply. “And while I do understand that it will give you an incomplete record, and your quite legendary reputation of anal-retentiveness toward your record keeping. I will ask that you accept my assurance that he has been neutralised and will not look into it any further.”

“As you wish, Lord President,” he answered with a light lower in his head. His hearts fell for Romana and the grief she must be suffering. “What about the Lord Doctor?” he queried. “And Braxiatel’s mate, Romana?”

“Such a foolish child, our Romanadvoratrelundar” he answered with a huff of disappointment in his voice. “Such potential in that young Daughter of Time. How she found herself within the clutches of such an abhorrent, arrogant fool, I will never know.” 

“Braxiatel is – _was_ – as charming as he was manipulative,” he offered. “Romana, she was quite…” He wasn’t sure how to continue that statement. His dear friend loved her mate unconditionally: flaws, deceit, betrayals, and all.

“She was immature,” Rassilon ventured knowingly. “Drawn in by the one who most embodied the Prydonian spirit within all of us.”

“I will complete and file the report of Braxiatel’s demise on your behalf,” he said with a low voice. “Will there be anything else, My Lord?”

Gods, he had to get this man out of here. There was a pain inside his own hearts, and he wanted to properly digest the information in his own way – out of the view of his murderer. And no matter who it was that pulled the trigger to end the lives of an old friend, he had no doubt at all in his mind that it was Rassilon who held the bulk of culpability for his death.

“There is,” Rassilon said with a firm tone as he lifted his head high and proud to look down on the much shorter man. “I have been issued a challenge of appearance from a young Human that I feel quite compelled to answer to.”

“A human?” Narvin balked. “You wish to answer to the challenge of a _human_?” His brows crashed together in a tight frown. “Why would you even consider such a thing?”

“Are you questioning me, Coordinator?”

“In this instance, yes I am,” he spat out. “You are a Time Lord, the supreme leader of us all. Why would you even entertain the notion of answering to a pathetic creature like a human?”

“This one is special,” he answered darkly. “The mate of our Lord Doctor, and one I’m intrigued to accept an audience with.”

Narvin shook his head. “No. I won’t allow this.”

“Again, you’re questioning your Lord President?” He swept his hand in a presentation of the office as a whole. “I can take all of this from you.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a President has taken it from me,” he growled. “And each time, it was deemed a mistake to do so.” His eyes narrowed. “There is no one else on Gallifrey with the knowledge, skill, experience, and aptitude to take on the role with any form of success than me.”

“Nor the arrogance and petulance, it seems.”

“I am CIA,” he reminded him. “They are imperative virtues for the position.”

“Indeed,” he purred. “However, when issued an order from your Lord President, it is _imperative_ that you obey that command.”

His teeth grit tightly together, and he dropped into a low and somewhat facetious bow. “As you wish, Lord President.” He lifted his eyes but remained in a low stoop. “And what am I needed to provide to you in order to facilitate your order?”

“I need to travel to Estrail,” he answered with a lift in his chin and shoulders. 

“Then take your capsule,” he answered blandly. “I am sure that Traffic Control and the Transduction Barrier teams will allow you to dematerialise.”

He paused a moment before answering, and when he did it was with a slightly guarded tone. “Materialisation of a capsule on Estrail is too risky.”

“And why is that?”

“Unstable magnetic forces due to solar flares of the sun,” he answered carefully.

“I wasn’t aware there was any solar flare activity in that particular region of late.”

“Why would you have needed to check?” Rassilon asked curiously. 

Narvin’s eyes pinched. His lips pursed outward and he dared venture what he thought might be a viable excuse. “There have been reports of Capsules disappearing in that solar system. I have been looking into potential causes…”

“I’d recommend you cease any investigations into Estrail,” Rassilon warned. “That area is under the surveillance of the Scientific Council and does not concern the Celestial Intervention Agency.”

“Disappearing Time Capsules certainly does,” he argued lightly. “The registry is looking a little light on the number of remaining registered Capsules since the end of the war, and any sudden new de-registrations do set of alarms within the Agency. I shouldn’t need to remind you that we can’t allow any of our time ships to get into the hands of…”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Rassilon said with a dismissive grunt. “There is no risk of that, I assure you, Coordinator.” He let out a breath. “I understand that personal Vortex Manipulators and wrist-worn travel devices were outlawed some time ago.”

“They were,” Narvin confirmed carefully. “Lady President Romana…”

“She is no longer President,” Rassilon remarked harshly. “I am your Lord President.” He waited for Narvin to nod in agreement before continuing. “Despite Romana’s orders to destroy such technologies, I will expect that the Agency kept certain items from the incinerator.”

Narvin merely looked at him. He didn’t respond.

“And therefore, as your President, I am asking you to provide me with a travel device so that I can travel to Estrail.”

Narvin shook his head. “For your own protection, I will decline.” He held up his hand before Rassilon could argue. “If travel by capsule is too dangerous due to magnetic interference, then it stands to reason that travel via vortex manipulator or dimension hoper will be moreso.”

“A risk I am willing to take.”

“But not one that I will take, My Lord President,” Narvin said flatly. “Especially for the rather pointless exercise of meeting with a human. Really, I can think of far better things to risk your lives on than that.”

“Your opinion on the matter means very little to me, Narvin.” He let out a huff. “Your in subordinance is quite frustrating.”

“There are certain matters in which I outrank your office Lord President,” he said with a sniff and a lift of his chin. “I shouldn’t need to remind you that the protection of our Supreme Lord President is our highest priority. I said no to Romana, to Matthias, to Livia, and even to his Lord Doctor when the lot of them tried to pull a ridiculous manoeuvre such as what you are planning to do.”

Rassilon’s eyes narrowed with fury and disgust. “Coordinator. I will warn you that you couldn’t have picked a worst time to act insubordinate and deny me the right to face those who have caused me slight this evening.”

“What is this slight?”

“A challenge from a lowly human is not enough for you?”

Narvin shook his head. “Hardly. The taunt of a human would barely be a flicker of interest to me.” The side of his mouth flicked up in a smile. “Not when I have the power to move far enough back in their timeline to ensure they were never born in the first place.”

“An idea worth exploring,” he muttered with a rub of his chin.

“But hardly worth the dent in the timeline,” he said with a sigh. “What I can offer you, my Lord President, is a holographic projection to Estrail. It will answer the challenge of this human, whilst maintaining your safety here on Gallifrey.”

He flicked a look toward him. “That is all you will provide me with?”

“Take it or leave it,” he answered with a shrug. He walked toward a large filing cabinet against the wall and pulled open a drawer. From within he pulled a small case. He blew dust from across the top of it as he walked back. “I haven’t used this in a while, but it is capable of crossing through dimensional walls and should easily broadcast your message to Estrail.” He set the case on his desk and flipped open the lid. “Do bear in mind that it’s not exactly a secure method of communication. We’ve found that the transmission wave can be easily hijacked if anyone has a decent grasp of radio transmissions – which is about sixty-percent of any of the species between Gallifrey and Estrail.”

“I’ll accept the risk,” Rassilon said with a smirk. 

“I’m sure you will.” He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “Just give me a moment to set it up, and I’ll have the broadcast scanner locate a projection source on Estrail.”

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~

She probably should have shrunk down somewhat underneath the heated and furious glare of the Time Lord President. His reputation was one of strength and power, an unyielding force of dominance and authority. What she looked upon, however, was an aged and withered looking man who oozed nothing except the stench of old age and self importance.

Honestly, he looked less a powerful Time Lord President and more like the leader of a coven of Hollywood-movie vampires. The withered and pathetic creature whose expiration date on sexiness and power ended several centuries earlier. Overthrown and destroyed by the youngsters he was supposed to control.

“So, you’re Rassilon?” she asked with an obviously unimpressed raking of her eyes up and down the robe and floor-length silken tunic worn by all council members who walked the hallways of the Capitol. “In a dress an’ all as well.” She walked around the Doctor’s protective form with a shake in her head and a slide of her hand around his hip. “How nice of you to dress up for me.”

“Rose,” the Doctor warned under his breath. He thrust up a hand to grab at her arm and prevent her from nearing the man. “I wouldn’t…”

Rassilon shot him a look of warning and held up his hand to him. “Oh, do let her speak, Lord Doctor.” His eyes shifted toward Rose and grinned dangerously. “You had so much to say earlier, didn’t you?” His smile fell into an expression of disgust. “and in such discourteous and colourful language. I’m fascinated to hear what insulting diatribe will come from her mouth next.”

“Wouldn’t much be worried about my mouth,” she said with a snarl.

“Rose, stop,” the Doctor growled in warning. His grip tightened on her arm and he tried pulling her closer to himself. His eyes were hard on the Time Lord President. “Let me handle him.”

Rassilon looked upon the Doctor with tiredness in his eyes and hummed to himself. “Are you sure that you’re really in an appropriate state of mind for handling anything, Lord Doctor?” He put on an expression of sympathy. “It is my understanding that condolences are in order. Braxiatel was a remarkable Lord. Such an incredible shame that he fell victim to the abhorrent virus that has taken so many of our people.”

Rose snarled and pulled her arm free of the Doctor’s. “How dare you,” she growled with a hard stride toward him. “How dare you think yourself worthy enough to even say his name.”

“I wonder how you dare yourself to be worthy enough to demand an audience with the Supreme Lord President of Gallifrey,” he countered with disdain in his eyes. “A pathetic and insignificant creature from a class five planet. Barely worth stepping on…”

“Oh, you arrogant piece of shit,” she snarled as she fought off the Doctor’s repeated attempts to grab her with large and awkward gloves and stormed forward. She pushed up her sleeves and swung her hand violently through the air toward his cheek with a loud grunt. Her hand swept through nothing and ended up spinning her in place with the force of it. She stumbled gracelessly with a stagger that dropped her against the Doctor’s waiting chest. She looked at her hand and then to him with confusion in her eyes. “What the hell?”

“Holographic image,” the Doctor said with a disgusted growl against her ear. “Seems the almighty Time Lord Leader was too busy to come to us in person.”

“Too much of a coward,” Leela corrected with a sneer as she holstered her blades and lifted to a taller stand. “Why am I not surprised by this?”

“Oh, I did try, _Savage_ ,” he said with a slow slide of his eyes toward her. “But it seems the Celestial Intervention Agency – specifically Coordinator Narvin – feels that my personal attendance is somewhat risky.”

“Nothing somewhat about it,” Rose said with a growl. The arms that were around her waist were now held more securely than she could have assumed was possible due to his clumsy space suit, and she gave up on trying to struggle free. “Show the size of your set and tell Narvin to put you on the first capsule to Estrail. Better yet, put him on, let me talk to him. Oi! Narvin! Where are you?”

The Doctor warned her with her name against her ear.

Narvin’s image walked into scene in a stand behind Rassilon. His head was low and his eyes lifted to peer at her with warning through his brows. He held his hands together in front of him and lifted the fingers of one to quietly ask for her calm.

“Be careful,” the Doctor whispered against her ear. “He’s in more danger there than any of us here right now.”

“You’re a fucking weasel,” Rose spat toward Narvin. “You, and all of the self righteous fools in Council. How could you be part of what’s going on here?”

“And just what is that?” Rassilon asked smoothly. “Just what is it that you think I’m doing here?”

“Killin’ Time Lords,” she spat out. “Sacrificing them…”

“I sacrifice no one,” he snarled in reply. “How dare you accuse me of any such atrocity toward my own people.” His eyes shifted up to the Doctor’s face. “Tame your savage little beast and tell her to mind her words and the accusations that she makes.”

“Welcome to your eternity, Child of Time,” She drawled with a sneer. “The call of time demands that we, the Time Lords of Gallifrey, must reach up to enact the Ultimate sanction of our people. To elevate the Lords of time to the highest incarnation across the entire universe sacrifices must be made.” Her breath drew in hard and long as she felt the Doctor’s tight hold loosen just slightly as he gasped against her ear. “Thank you for your sacrifice Son of Time, Daughter of Time…”

Rassilon wore an expression of surprise that quickly turned into a sneer of fury. “How and where did you hear that, child?”

“I heard it in the voices of a thousand dying time capsules,” the snapped as she finally pulled free of her husband’s hold. “Capsules in pain and grieving the loss of their pilots. They told me. They let me see it all. The murder of the men and women they loved most in the entire universe at the hands of the one they had to trust more than any other.”

“Impossible,” he growled. “Communication on that level … it’s only achievable between capsules. Not with their pilot, and certainly not in the inferior underdeveloped mind of a human.” He pointed a finger at her, straightening his back into an arch to pull himself to an unnatural height over her as she walked toward his holographic image. “Coordinator Narvin,” he growled back over his shoulder to the man standing behind him. “I order the CIA to find and arrest this … human…”

“On what charges?” he asked calmly with slow shake in head and an upward roll of his eyes to the ceiling.

“Treason, with the penalty of death.”

“She isn’t Gallifreyan,” Narvin said quietly. “She cannot be held to our laws of treason.”

His eyes flicked toward the Doctor. “Maybe not, but he can. And after centuries of this renegade Son of Time wreaking his havoc across all of space and time in complete contradiction to all of the laws of Rassilon, the universe will thank me to finally put an end to it.” His eyes snapped toward Rose. “As I have done with Braxiatel and Ulysses before him, I will destroy the Doctor as well – the last of the hybrid abominations erased from Gallifrey. The purity of our people returned.”

Rose stalked forward. “Don’t you dare threaten him,” she charged angrily at the same time she heard the Doctor plead for her to stop. 

“And what do you plan to do about it, human?”

“Wanna find out?” she growled. She pointed toward where the funnel once spun. “You saw what I did to that, yeah?”

He blinked at her.

“That’s nothing.” She held her hands in fists at her side. “You don’t know what lengths I’ll go to protect the Doctor. I will rip apart all of reality for him, destroy anyone and anything that tries to hurt him. He’s my entire universe, the man I love more’n anyone. He’s my mate, my husband, the father to my children, and the single most important person to me in all time and space.”

“Rose,” the Doctor pleaded gently. “Don’t…” His hearts both softened and hurt to finally hear some confirmation from her that her heart still beat for him as strongly as his did for her, but this wasn’t the way he wanted to get that assurance. Not because of a threat. “Ignore him, it’s not worth it.”

“And the Daleks,” she continued dangerously with a thrust of her hand behind her to point toward the Doctor. “They _tried_ to kill him, didn’t they? But I wasn’t lettin’ it happen.” She held her hand up in front of her face and wiggled her fingers. “I destroyed an entire fleet of Daleks with the wave of my hand. _This_ hand right here. All of them. The whole bloody lot of them.” She panted angrily. “You? A coward Time Lord – a piece of cake by comparison.”

“You really think so?” he challenged with a smile. 

“Oh, I know so,” she said with a sneer as she walked closer to his hologram. “Unlike this lot, I’m not scared of you at all.”

“Do not think that my not talking means that I have fear, Rose,” Leela corrected her. “I am not scared of this cretin. I will fight this weaselly creature at your side, Rose.” She bared her blade to puncutate her desire. “I will take pleasure in avenging the death of Braxiatel.”

“Get in line,” Rose murmured.

“One heart each,” Leela negotiated with a smile.

“Works for me.”

Rassilon looked between the two of them. “I’m not afraid of either of you,” he assured. “I am the Supreme Lord President of Gallifrey. The resurrected one. I cannot, and will not die – particularly at the hands of pathetic creatures such as yourselves.”

“That makes us more dangerous, don’t you think?” Rose queried as she moved closer to his image.

“Rose,” the Doctor warned her. “Don’t get too close.”

“Why not?” she asked with a shrug. “It’s a hologram, what can it do?” She turned from him to look at the hologram and gasped at the unreasonably close proximity she had to him. They were mere inches apart.

“Perhaps you should have listened to your mate,” he warned her with a sneer in his lip as his hand curled around her throat and he squeezed tightly.

Rose choked and gasped. Her eyes blew wide as he straightened up and lifted her up onto her toes. Her hands scrabbled at his wrists, but only managed to swipe through the image. “Prydonian Telepathic mastery,” he said to her with a laugh in his voice. “If you walk within my holographic field, and I can control your mind, Human. And right now, your mind believes I’m choking the life right out of you.”

The Doctor launched from his place and threw his arms around her waist. With a long cry and a grunt he tugged at her, trying to draw her free of Rassilon’s hold. “Let her go!” he demanded of him with a grunt. At the rear of the hologram, Leela attacked with her blades, each swipe only distorting the image rather than striking into his hearts. “Please, Rassilon. Let her go. She’s nothing to you. Nothing in the great scheme of things.”

“Oh, my dear Son of Time,” he said with a laugh and a look into his helmet. “You have no idea just how important she really is.”

“Kill me if you want,” he pleaded in offering. “I’ll surrender to you right now. Just please, leave my wife alone.”

A stranger’s voice huffed in with impatience. “Really, Lord Rassilon. Rose is so important to you that you’re willing to choke the life out of her? Trust me when I say that if she’s dead, she’s no use to anyone – particularly you.” He held a staser in his hand and looked toward the Doctor. “Now, Thete. If you wouldn’t mind, please take a step back. You’re in my way.”

The Doctor retained his hold on his struggling and choking wife, but he watched upon the man in blue jeans and a sport jacket with wide eyes. “Brax?”

“Oh, forget it,” he huffed with a flick of his eyes to the corner. “I always forget how much you lose any sense of intelligence where Rose is concerned.” He flicked the aim of his weapon to fire at a curve of glass. With a squeeze of the trigger, a ribbon line of energy shot from his weapon, onto the glass, and then ricocheted onto a small electrical imaging device buried inside a chunk of concrete on the ground. Immediately the image of Rassilon dissipated and Rose fell hard onto the Doctor’s chest. She gasped and coughed violently into his chest as she battled to find her breath. He lowered the both of them to the ground to better hold her as she stabilised her breathing.

“Thank you,” he said down his shoulder but without actually looking toward him. “Again.”

“It’s becoming a bit of a habit. You’re welcome. Just so you know, we’re even now, so you can stop bringing it up.” 

“Bringing what up?”

“You’ll find out. Just remember now and shut up about it from here on in.” He tucked his weapon into the back waistband of his jeans. “Right. So. Which way did I go?” He was met with stunned silence from Leela and looked between them all with his brows seated high on his forehead in question. “Did none of you happen to see where I took off to?” He held up a large and nasty looking syringe filled with a glistening glowing substance. “Bit of a time crunch here, so if you don’t mind?”

Tiallu yapped loudly at his hip, which captured his attention. With a light smile toward the wolf he gave a nod. “Ahh, yes. That’s right, the mean one is with me, isn’t he? Well. Come on. Take me to your mate.” He looked to the Doctor. “Don’t go anywhere until we get back. Thanks to this little debacle, the time for playing around arguing across a tabletop is officially over. We’ve got real work ahead of us, and a lot to discuss.” He ducked through the crack in the wall after Tiallu, disappearing as quickly as he had appeared.

Leela looked toward the Doctor with her brows high and her eyes wide. “Doctor. Was that … _Braxiatel_?”

He nodded slowly.

“He was the naked one, from inside the funnel?” she continued. “An older Braxiatel?”

Again, the Doctor nodded slowly. 

“This means there are two of him here,” she pressed further. _“Two_ Braxiatels?”

He continued to nod slowly.

“Oh, this I do not like,” she said with a low growl of worry. “That is too much hot air and arrogance in one place at one time. Romana will not be happy about this.” Her eyes flicked to the Doctor. “Is this safe? I mean for two of him to be here at one time?”

"No." He shook his head in response and winced. “Not in the slightest, Leela.”

“Oh,” she said with a slow nod of her head. She swallowed and then let her mouth stretch to a small smile. “Then this will be fun, won’t it?”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	30. Antidote

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narvin receives an order from Rassilon ... Team TARDIS deal with two Braxiatels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a chapter I absolutely struggled with. I simply couldn't get it to work right AT ALL! Then 2020 decided to play games with me, and the energy I had got zapped as I sorted that mess out.
> 
> Should have had this finished and posted yesterday, but we got hit with a massive, massive, short and violent sudden storm that wiped out my power, my internet, my cellular reception and data, my trees, my neighbours trees, flooded the city ... broke my brand new patio umbrella. (very upset by that)... so yesterday was out... hufff.
> 
> So anyhoo, it really hurt my flow and made this very difficult to get back into. But I am back, and I'm ready to keep at it. I have a challenge (long overdue) that I should get into tomorrow... fun and fluff.
> 
> Anyhoo, I really sinceriously hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOOooo~~ 

Rassilon inhaled a long gasp and staggered backward as though released from the firm hold on another. His hand was still held upward in a chokehold position, his hand still taut. He didn’t let it drop but turned his head toward his shoulder as he spoke to the man standing silently behind him.

“What happened?” he demanded harshly. “The human was in my hand, where is she?”

“Connection was lost,” Narvin answered rather coolly. “It would seem that the projection point was damaged in some way – possibly during whatever incident destroyed that building –“

“I heard a staser blast,” Rassilon interrupted angrily. He let his hand fall and spun to glare toward him. “The connection was forcibly terminated – _by_ a Gallifreyan weapon.”

“It may well have been,” he admitted without the shrug and rolling eyes that would typically accompany the tone of voice he used. “Out of my control, I am sure you will understand.”

“Who was he?” Rassilon growled. “Who was that man?”

“I’m not quite sure how you would expect me to be any wiser toward his identity than you are,” he answered smoothly. “Though I will suspect it is most likely another human.”

“Time Lord,” he corrected sharply. “He carried a staser.”

“Easy enough to procure when you walk alongside Braxiatel,” Narvin mused with a light one-sided smirk. “It isn’t out of the realm of possibility that the other humans are capable of using one. I know it as fact that the Savage one knows how to use a staser. Taught by her mate as is my understanding. And wherever she is, Andred isn’t too far away.”

“Are you suggesting that it could have been Andred who intervened?” Rassilon breathed out with darkness in his tone. “Has he become treasonous as well as the rest of them?”

“That was definitely not Andred,” Narvin said with a snort. “Not dressed like _that_ at any rate. And unless he’s regenerated since I saw him last, his incarnation was a little … _larger_ … than the man we saw.”

“Then who?”

Narvin lifted his eyes to the towering form of Rassilon. His own expression was one of forced neutrality. Best he shield the disdain he felt toward the Lord President inside him for now. “While I am flattered that you seem to hold such high regard in my skills of observation and deduction; I do have to admit that I really don’t know who it was. A split-second glimpse of a generic looking individual really doesn’t yield all that much – even to me.”

“You _will_ find out,” Rassilon ordered him with a sneer. “I want him found, and I want him brought to me. Alive, and in one piece so that I can apply consequences myself.”

“Easier said than done,” he murmured under his breath.

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“As you wish, My Lord President,” Narvin replied with a bow in his head. “I will get onto it immediately.”

“See that you do,” he warned him on a low and hostile voice. “You have two days to bring me the information I require…”

“And if I’m not able to present you with the information you require?”

“Defy me and find out,” he answered with a flourish in the roll of his shoulders as he turned to leave the office. He spoke to Narvin over his shoulder, rather than turn to face him with respect. “I look forward to learning about what you find…”

“I’m sure you do,” he huffed out through his nose as the door whoofed closed behind the Time Lord President. His eyes narrowed upon the closed door to his office. “Braxiatel, you insufferable pig-rat. If he doesn’t kill you, you can bet I’ll be the one to do it.”

He strode around his desk and slapped a dimly-lit panel on the wooden surface with the backs of his fingers. A holographic screen popped up with a slow warm to full display. While he waited for the connection to the CIA servers to connect properly, he pulled open a draw beside his hip and drew out a thick leather strap with a wide rounded device attached to it. He let his eyes shift to the holographic display as he fastened it onto his left wrist. He then drummed his fingers on the desk as the small spinning circle at the centre of his screen finale disappeared to indicate full access had been achieved. 

“Now,” he murmured to himself as his fingers sped across the laser projection keyboard and he watched the monitor in front of him flash, flicker, and scroll into the deepest depths of the barrel of information he was searching for. A small flicker in the corner of the screen caught his eye and he smirked somewhat proudly to himself as he touched his finger to it and swept it with a flourish to expand it fully on his screen.

“Found you.”

He typed the long code of temporal coordinates into the face of his device, then leaned forward to garbage the information on his system. A quick series of keystrokes, and he quickly removed any possible signature or footprint that he could leave behind him.

“Oh-kay,” he breathed with apprehension and a indecision. He really didn’t want to do this. Travelling by Vortex Manipulator was so horribly rudimentary and primitive … and really quite disorientating. “I hate you, Braxiatel,” he muttered to himself as he closed his eyes and pressed the face of the device.

Immediately he felt his stomach do a full whoop as his mind swam, swelled, and swirled with the full force of the Time Vortex buffeting him from every single possible angle. He grit his teeth and counted off the seconds until he felt the sucking sensation of vortex travel finally release to spit him out into his new reality.

His eyes flew open and he staggered with disorientation and blurred vision inside a large room adorned with wooden walls and décor lit by bright orange lighting. 

“Oh, by the Gods,” he moaned to himself as he pressed a hand into a support beam close to the room’s centre and leaned forward. “There is nothing at all pleasant about that.”

Andred’s voice piped up with slight amusement at his side. “Vortex Manipulator, Narvin? Trying to cut back on operational costs at the CIA?”

There was a retort to that in his still swirling mind, and he did open his mouth to apply that retort, but he quickly slammed his lips closed and held them together with the bite of his teeth as his stomach churned in warning. His eyes widened, his cheeks puffed out, and he held up a finger to ask a moment as he searched urgently for a receptacle.

“Beside the desk,” Andred advised with a light sigh of understanding. “Should do for what you need.”

Narvin nodded and quickly fled toward the desk in question. He stooped to scoop up the lined trash bin and slammed it on top of the desk. His arms curled tightly around the top and he loudly heaved the entire contents of his stomach atop waste paper and an empty, crumpled, aluminium can. Once the last shudders of retching had finally ebbed away, he shoved the wastebasket forward along the desk and pressed both hands into the tabletop. He moaned with discomfort as he slouched in his forward lean.

“Give it a minute,” Andred advised. “You’ll be fine.”

Narvin nodded slowly, steadied his breathing, then sounded out the most polite of burps behind the palm of his hand. “Disgusting.”

A bottle of water was thrust underneath his nose, which he accepted with a nod of thanks. Obviously not a brand-new bottle, considering there was only about a third of the contents remaining, but he did down it quickly, then tossed the empty bottle into the trash basket. He exhaled as he finally straightened himself to his full height and took a proper look around him.

“Braxiatel’s capsule?” he questioned with a knowing smirk. “Good. Still able to bypass his sneaky ..” His words halted to see Romana seated in a despondent lean on the floor, her back propped up against the centre console. He spoke her name with alarm and strode quickly toward her. “Are you okay?”

She looked up at him with sodden eyes. Complete anguish had contorted her usually perfect features into a pathway of red blotchy lines and patches. She slowly shook her head. “He’s gone, Narvin. Brax. He’s dead.”

He dropped into a crouch before her. His expression was one that conveyed true empathy, but the shake in his head was more apt toward chiding. “Are you quite sure of that, Romana?”

She held her hand in a fist between her breasts. “I feel it here,” she said with a croak in her voice. “The pain of it.”

He hummed and lifted his eyes for her forehead. He lifted a hand and tapped at her temple with a fingertip. “And in here, do you feel the same?” His brow lifted with facetious condescension. “I’ll hazard a guess that you don’t, considering Braxiatel is still as far from death as any of us.” He paused and lifted his eyes. “Got more lives per incarnation than a cat, that one.”

He pulled himself up to a stand and wandered around the console to familiarise himself with the controls. “I’ll guess that the Doctor’s TARDIS is on scene with the rest of them.”

Romana held a white wolf cub against her chest, that was gnawing happily on the lapel of her jacket and rose to a stand. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yes, his TARDIS is on the ground.”

“I’ll pilot this ship to that location then,” he said with a sigh. His eyes shifted to the pup against Romana’s chest. “Does Braxiatel know you have an animal on his ship?”

“How can you pilot his ship?” Romana asked. “Not even _I_ can set materialisation and dematerialisation coordinates and hope she listens.”

“The same way I knew how to locate him,” Narvin answered without looking at her. His focus was more on pairing the ship with the other capsule for a seamless flight. “And no, I won’t tell you how.”

He flipped up a lever and looked to the rotor column as he slowly began to pulse and whine. “That’s a good girl,” he said with a light smile of urging. “Take us to your pilot.” He looked again to the pup. “What kind of Earth animal have you managed to adopt? You know that it can’t be taken to Gallifrey, right? Quarantine rules on off-world fauna are among most prescriptive laws in the entire galaxy.”

“It’s a young Dahrama,” She answered him with a scratch at the pup’s ears.

He pulled back fast from the console edge, not sure if he should run away with a scream or look upon the animal with awe. “It can’t be,” he managed out. “They … They’re extinct. The entire species was wiped out in the war.” He looked to Romana with a light pinch of urgency in his eyes. “If that is truly a Dahrama, then that animal needs to be returned to Gallifrey and protected.”

“I doubt very much that his parents will allow that,” she said with a weak smile. Her eyes shifted to the door as the capsule announced full materialisation with a light huff. “They’re probably already concerned that he was in flight without them. Soliarn is particularly aggressive when he think’s his offspring is in any form of danger or duress.”

He looked to the door and slumped just slightly. “Oh, don’t tell me there’ll be a pair of those damn things waiting at the doors.” His expression was so tightly drawn that his skin practically whined. “From the frying pan and into the fire _every single time_ …”

~~ooooOOOOooo~~

Leela, Rose, and the Doctor had remained in relative silence for a long while after the Doctor had admitted that Braxiatel existed twice in this current timeline. Each of them held their own very unique internal reaction to the news and were trying to work through it. 

Rose was thrilled; it meant that Brax was alive, that he wasn’t lost to the forests to walk as a Brambie .. or a Zorax .. or any other combination of Brax and Zombie that might have made her chuckle if it was anyone else except her brother in law.

Leela was of two and three minds to it. She wasn’t upset. She wasn’t thrilled. She was confused, of course; but she was also quietly relieved. Guilt held position deep within the back of her mind. She’d almost killed him. Had Rose not fought so hard to save him, then Braxiatel would have died by her blades … one in each heart and no hope at all for regeneration.

For the Doctor, the admission was just … _tiring_. His relationship with his brother was a rollercoaster of such intense highs, lows, twists, and turns that it would be a ride condemned on any planet across the universe. Would it just be simpler for the both of them if they returned to the out of sight and mind relationship they’d quite happily settled into for most of their lives? One look at the smile on Rose’s face, though, and he knew they couldn’t. Rose loved the old boy as much as she loved anyone. She’d be heartbroken if they went their separate ways. Best that he invest in stocks of Gravol if he was to survive whatever their future had to offer them…

There was a groaning sound, the rustle of fallen leaves, the crack of twigs, and the Doctor quickly jogged around Rose to take up a protective position beside Leela. He held his sonic screwdriver out with a full extension of his arm. His head dropped into a glare of aggression down along the length of his arm.

“I will handle what it is that comes, Doctor,” Leela suggested with a tone that warned him to back off a good few feet and let her take on the challenge.

“We both will,” he corrected her.

“My blade will do more in our defence than the whirr of your screwdriver,” she remarked with a light smirk. “But if it will make you feel better to stand in the defence of your wife, then I will not stand in your way.”

“Of course you will,” he replied with a light smirk. “I would expect no less.”

They both stood on guard ready to make their stand as a hand curled around the split in the wall. It was clear to both Leela and the Doctor that this hand didn’t belong to a zombie; there was far too much colour and life in it. To the other side of the crack another hand appeared to clutch with effort at the jagged concrete.

“You really need to lay off the pie,” a voice grumbled out with obvious annoyance. “Really, Irving, you weigh far too much for someone of your stature.” There was a grunt. “Here’s an idea: How about you at least try to bear some of your own weight instead of relying on me to tolerate your burden.”

“Perhaps you should pull a few more weights instead,” he snarked in reply. “And I think you can afford me a little consideration and understanding considering I went through an extremely painful and explosive regeneration – only to find _you_ waiting on the other of it rather than anyone I actually care about.”

“Excuses, excuses.”

Leela sighed deeply and holstered her knives. She looked toward the Doctor with the lightest expression of disappointment in her eyes. “It is only Braxiatel.” Her brows pinched. “I mean the two of them.”

The Doctor didn’t lower his sonic. He kept his aim tight. His eyes narrowed further with aim as the pair of Braxiatel’s finally emerged through the crack in the wall. The elder of the two supported the weakened man with an arm around his waist as he navigated them over the debris to find a clearing that would allow him to stand on his own two feet. He lifted his eyes to the Doctor and his sonic as he passed by.

“Really, Thete?” He huffed. “Put that thing away. You look like an idiot.”

“He really doesn’t need it to look like one,” the younger man said with a sigh. “It’s pretty much his default setting.” His eyes widened with horror and he let out a sudden and almost terrified swear in ancient High Gallifreyan when he heard his name called out with teary excitement. He waved a hand urgently toward her. “Rose. No! I can’t support…”

He oomphed at the collision of Rose against his chest and staggered backward a good three strides in an attempt not to fall on his arse completely. The wall against his back helped with that, and he pushed back hard on it to try and maintain some form of dignity while a tiny blonde woman sobbed into his chest. He looked to his brother for assistance.

“I just can’t,” he admitted meekly.

The Doctor nodded and finally dropped the arm that held his sonic high. He exhaled and closed the short distance between himself and his wife. “Rose,” he said with soft firmness as he took hold of her arms to pull her back. “Come here. Give him some air, Brax is still weak from regenerating.”

“Not to mention his body trying to burn out a huon injection,” the elder Braxiatel said with a light shrug. “Diluted dosage though it was, it still packs a punch.” He held open his arms to Rose with a smile. “Though _I’m_ here if you want…”

Rose held up her hand and shook her head. She leaned against the chest of the Doctor and let out a sigh. “Really. You guys are just tiring, you know that?”

“I do indeed,” the elder Braxiatel admitted with a long sigh and a lift of his eyes to the night sky above. He let his arms fall to his sides. “This past 24 hours have been quite something for you, haven’t they Rose?”

“Little bit.”

He let his eyes fall down to hers. “Don’t worry, it all comes to an end very shortly; and you can begin yet another day of mischief and mayhem and mortal danger for all.” He held up his hand very quickly. “Now, that isn’t to say that I know for sure that any such mischief and mayhem will occur any time soon. My memories of today are – for very obvious reasons – a little hazy.”

“Then it might be smart of you to shut up, then,” the Doctor warned. “Might’n it?”

“Says he of the endless gob,” he drawled flatly in reply.

The Doctor gave him a very small smirk in reply. “So. Now that you’ve done what you came here to do, I expect you’ll be leaving then? I’m sure that I don’t need to tell you of the potential ramifications of having more than one of you here in this timeline.”

Both of the Braxiatels gave a snort at that, but it was the elder one who chose to comment. “I’ve been successfully spending time with additional incarnations of myself for centuries, Thete. Haven’t had a major disaster yet.”

“That does not mean that it will not happen,” Leela warned him. “Like the Doctor, I am not comfortable with more than one of you here, Braxiatel. I am sure that Romana will feel the same.”

The sound of a materialising capsule echoed through the alcove, which made the elder Braxiatel let out a sigh. “I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we?” He turned to face the capsule as it materialised within scowling distance. “Speak of the Devil…”

“I will not tell Romana that you refer to her as the Devil,” Leela said with a light huff in her voice. She strode toward the capsule as the materialisation completed. “I think that you are in enough trouble.”

“You have no idea,” the Elder Braxiatel muttered on a low voice. He took a long stride backward to put himself outside of where he assumed would be the peripheral of his wife. His eyes flicked to his younger self. “Brace yourself, Irving…”

“Incandescent?” he asked with an upward lift of his eyes. 

“Only slightly less than that if I recall correctly.” He exhaled apologetically. “Fear-driven, I’m afraid, which makes it so much worse for you.”

“Brilliant,” he managed out as he tried his best to stand up straight and stable. Best he put on his most towering posture to help get him through this one. He rolled his head on his neck and shifted the seat of his shoulders, his eyes tight on the opening of his capsule doors. He didn’t need to guess just which of the occupants would exit first – protocol dictated that in the absence of Chancellery Guards it would be Romana. While not currently President, all of them behaved as though she still held the highest office on the planet. Andred couldn’t provide a buffer, he would remain at the capsule doors a polite few seconds behind her.

Romana did, indeed, exit the capsule ahead of Andred. Her posture was high and proud, and Braxiatel could feel the sizzle of anger from her over the handful of metres that separated them. She let her eyes graze across the area in analysis as to whether or not there was any immediate danger. Once assured she would be safe, she let her eyes drag angrily across the grouping to finally land on her husband.

“Braxiatel,” she said with a furious growl in her voice. She didn’t immediately move to approach him, instead she seemed to wait for him to acknowledge her first.

Braxiatel refused to display the same level of heated aggression he could see in her eyes, so instead he opted to brighten wide a smile and call to her with exaggerated happiness in his tone. “Romana!” he ignored the face-palming moan from his brother and opened up his arms in presentation of his new form. “How do you like the new me?”

That got her moving. With her hands balled into tight fists at her sides, she stalked toward him. There was a light forward lean of her chest and a scowl that was contorting her usually beautiful features. Her look of hostility didn’t fade the closer she got to him, if anything it seemed to deepen.

“Irving Braxiatel,” she seethed through her teeth. “You infuriating, insufferable, exasperating, intolerable…”

“You’re doubling up on your synonyms,” he ventured calmly with a lift in his brow, looking down to her as she met him chest to chest.

“That would be because there are insufficient words in any language to effectively describe how incensed you make me on an almost hourly basis,” she shot back with an expression of furious incredulity. “And as usual, you refuse to acknowledge or take any responsibility for what you did that causes so much upset.”

“I scared you,” he remarked on a calm tone. “I’m not refusing to acknowledge that.”

“When you keep doing it,” she argued hotly. “You’re not only refusing to acknowledge it, but you’re being deliberately ignorant to it.” If she was any other person, she may have clenched her fists tightly and even stomped a foot with frustration. Instead she snatched her hands forward to clutch a hard handful of his fatigue tunic. She spoke through her teeth at him. “I thought you were dead, Irving. I thought I had lost you – for _good_ this time.”

“That will never happen,” he vowed fiercely with a snap of his arm around her back. “I vowed to you that until the end of our lives we would be together, as one. That’s a promise I intend to keep.” His voice softened. “My hearts are in your hands, Romana. They beat only because of you … and they will beat for as long as you need them to. I’m not going anywhere.”

“That’s a lie and you know it,” she challenged him with a crease in her brow and a waver in her voice. “You’re always off _somewhere_ , Brax.”

“Then tell me to _stay_ , Romana.” He exhaled a long breath. “One word, that’s all. Just one. Stay.”

She curled a hand around the back of his neck and tugged his head down to touch his forehead to hers. “Stay,” she demanded shortly. 

“As you wish,” he breathed out against her lips before claiming them in a kiss fierce enough that he lifted her completely from the ground and pulled her tightly against his chest.

“Very inappropriate and discomforting behavior from the both of you,” Narvin complained darkly as he passed by. “This is hardly the time for _that_ kind of nonsense.” His head shook as he approached the elder of the two Braxiatels. He stood before him with a straight back and shoulders and gazed at him with an expression of disapproval and annoyance. “You will be the death of me.”

“Oh, I do try, he answered with an exaggerated sigh and a roll in his eyes. “No such luck as yet.”

“Yes, well keep trying,” he droned sardonically. “I’m sure that persistence will pay off eventually.”

The Doctor held his wife against his side as he walked up to join both his older-older brother and Narvin. He greeted the CIA Coordinator with a nod of his head. “Are you part of an advanced party set to converge on his area to take us all back to Gallifrey?”

“Like to see any of them try,” Rose muttered under her breath, to which she received a sharp glare of warning from her husband.

Narvin let his eyes flick between the two of them and settled his attention on the Doctor. “No. I assure you that his Lord President isn’t planning on sending any one over here any time soon.” He paused and let a light frown cross his face. “Actually. Given his penchant for changing his mind every five nano-spans, I shouldn’t really make that guarantee.” He shuddered and shook his head. “No. I was tasked with determining the identity of the man who ended Rassilon’s assault on Rose.” He looked to Rose and then to Braxiatel. “I came by of my own accord to offer warning.” He drew in a breath. “And to find out just what in the name of Omega is actually going on here.”

The Doctor drew in a breath. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” He lifted his hand to scratch at his sideburn, but upon remembering he was wearing a helmet merely dropped it back down to his side and let out a huff. “We know the _what_ of it. The _why_ , however…” he rolled his eyes and shook his head. “That’s another thing entirely.”

“Was he truly killing Time Lords and taking their remaining regenerations?”

“I’m afraid so,” the younger Braxiatel answered. He walked into the group with an exhausted gait and his arm around the waist of his wife to help keep him standing. “Rose can offer you far more insight into how it was achieved, but I can confirm that the Dogma Virus has been employed to remove a Time Lord or Lady’s remaining regenerations.”

“That was never the purpose of the Dogma Virus,” Narvin countered with a frown. “It was to sterilise the Time Lords and stop them from regenerating. Not to remove and capture any remaining regenerations.”

“Well I suppose his _Lord President_ gave it a bit of an upgrade, didn’t he?” the younger Braxiatel seethed. He looked to his elder self. “You’re awfully quiet. I know full well that it’s never a good thing for any one of us to be silent for any length of time.”

“Brief analysis,” he answered carefully. “Determining just what I can and cannot inject into this conversation.”

“Oh don’t go citing spoilers at us,” the Doctor answered sharply. “You’re here now, and you’ve been here before, so to save us all a bit of time so we can get home in time to pick up our children from school and various other domesticities…”

“Time Ship,” the elder Braxiatel answered shortly with a gesture toward the TARDIS. “In case you forgot. Capable of materialising in any place within time and space. Do you need a refresher, perhaps, in how to access those specific time travel functions?”

“Facetiousness really isn’t necessary, nor is it in any way beneficial to the current discussion,” the Doctor snipped in reply.

“No, but it makes _me_ feel better.”

“Both of you,” Romana warned. “That’s about enough. If we are to properly determine just what actually happened here, what Rassilon’s intentions were for the capture of so many regenerations, and where we think he will go from here, then the two of you need to stop with the childish back and forth and act like a couple of adults.”

“I think the more important question right now,” Rose offered with a shrug. “Is where has all that energy has gone to now, and whether or not any of the zombie Time Lords out there are able to be cured like Brax was.” She stood beside Leela just slightly back of the circle of Time Lords, not quite comfortable with entering the conversation, but less comfortable with remaining quiet. She looked toward the edge of the forest. “The only reason we all stepped in to begin with was because Brax didn’t want the souls of the Time Lords to suffer in pain for eternity. An’ more than that, I don’t want any of those capsules suffering any more, either.”

Narvin looked toward her. There was a light narrowing of his eyes. “Capsules?”

“Hundreds of them,” she clarified with a nod. “Maybe thousands. Some of them are dead, but most of them…” She sighed and offered him a look of heartache. She tapped at her temple with her fingertip. “They’re in here. They’re crying and in pain.”

He kept his eyes on her for a moment as he processed that new information. “You can feel that?” he mused on little more than a surprised whisper. He then looked toward Romana and the younger of the Braxiatels and gave a gesture toward Rose. “She shouldn’t be able to feel that. No one except a symbiotically linked Time Lord is supposed to hear the song of a capsule.” He inhaled deeply. “And she’s _human_?”

“ _She’s_ right here, Narvin,” Rose chipped out shortly. “You wanna know about me, then you ask _me_ , yeah?”

“Of course,” he answered somewhat dutifully rather than politely. He kept his eyes on Romana. “We have non-linked and possibly grieving capsules here numbering into the hundreds – maybe thousands. They can’t remain here. I don’t need to tell you incredibly disastrous it would be if they end up in the hands of non Gallifreyans…”

“Yes, yes,” Romana huffed out impatiently. “I can assure you that for now they are quite safe from non-Gallifreyan hands.”

“I’ll need to send a team here to log and retrieve all of them.” He rubbed at the back of his head and exhaled a huff. “That will take some time.”

“Not to mention a lot of risk,” the younger Braxiatel murmured. “We still don’t know exactly what is capturing the capsules to crashland them here in the first place. Additionally, we need to determine just where the infection is coming from.”

“Not from this planet,” Rose offered gently. “The Time Lords were already infected before they crash landed here.”

“How do you know?” Narvin asked her with a narrowing of his eyes. “How could you possibly know that?”

“The capsules showed me,” she repeated with a shrug in her shoulders. She let out a short sound of frustration and confusion. “I don’t know what to tell you, Narvin. I don’t. I don’t understand it, but if you want to connect and see for yourself…” She pointed to her temple. “Then that’s okay. I consent.”

His eyes flared at the suggestion. “Oh. Err.” His head shook tightly. “There’s no need for that. None at all.” His eyes flicked up toward the Doctor and then fell off to one side. “That’s a level of intimacy I’m not entirely comfortable with.”

“Never stopped you before,” Andred said with a light tilt in his head and a pinch in his eye. “When you’ve needed information in the past.”

“Well it’s stopping me now,” he gruffed in reply. He let his eyes fall to Rose, respectful of her earlier chiding. “If you’re quite sure of what you were shown during your telepathic connection with the capsules, then I won’t question it.” He looked toward the elder Braxiatel. “I suspect you know the answers to all of our questions, which renders any of this moot.”

A discomforted expression crossed his face. He made a slight sound from the back of his throat as he considered the question and how it best be answered. “Unfortunately, my memories of this day, and of the years following in regard to this particular situation, are quite – oh how should I put it? Incomplete.”

“Of course it is,” Narvin said with a light growl in his tone. “I don’t know why I thought this could go any easier than it should be.” His eyes flicked to the Doctor. “So you may as well take that helmet off, Doctor. Your mate suggests that the pathogen you’re trying to evade doesn’t originate from here…”

“But it _is_ here,” he argued lightly. “As proven by Brax becoming a Zombie.”

“Which means every single one of us is already infected,” he said with a shrug. “However…” his eyes shifted toward the elder Braxiatel. “You have a cure, I see.”

“One was … _engineered_ … quite some time ago,” he admitted carefully. “By means that I would prefer were discussed with Thete and my younger self at a more appropriate time.” His eyes shifted toward Rose and then back to Narvin. “The procurement of the most necessary ingredients are of a rather sensitive nature.”

“You mean me,” Rose cut in blandly. She wasn’t surprised to see the almost guilty expression pass by Braxiatel’s face. “Hard not to work out, really. You told me as much in there…” she gestured toward where the tornado once was and looked him up, and then down with a light smirk. “When you were starkers. Called me the _antidote_ and told me to make sure I told the Doctor that.”

“And did you?” He gestured toward the Doctor, who was in the motions of removing his helmet. “Tell Thete what I told you to tell him?”

“Haven’t quite had the chance, have I?”

“No, I suppose you haven’t,” he drawled on a breath. He looked toward the Doctor; his brow high on his forehead as he waited for the helmet to be dropped onto the ground before continuing. “You’ll all have to make sure that you’ve been injected with the serum created from…” he flicked his eyes briefly toward Rose. “I mean the antidote.” He inhaled. “Infected or not, it’s for the best.”

“And you have this antidote?” Leela asked with a light narrowing of her eye as her gaze slid past her husband toward Braxiatel. “Enough for all of you?”

“Enough for any remaining infected Time Lords on Estrail, in fact,” he said with a light smile. The smile faltered and he exhaled hard. “The research to find a cure, and to minimise any of the negative side effects that come from a forced regeneration from one species to another…”

“A zombie is a species now?” Rose asked with her brows high on her forehead.

He held his breath for a slight moment, letting his mind wade through the myriad of responses he had to that question. He opted not to focus on it too much and start something that might escalate toward something unpleasant and instead looked toward Romana and his younger self.

“I’ve returned to this particular timeline in order to try and reverse the effects of the virus and save as many of our people as I can.” He looked past Romana’s shoulder toward the flash of white, which heralded the return of the two feisty beasts who had protected his younger self. He then looked toward Leela and Andred. “It would help me if the two of you could stay here and assist. I imagine it will take some considerable time to scour the forests…”

The Doctor rolled his head with discomfort against the space suit. He tugged as best he could at the tight fabric fitted around his throat. “How is the antidote administered?”

“Retro fitted stasers,” he answered with a shrug. He then looked toward his younger self who looked fit to protest about why a large and painful syringe was used on him instead of a relatively painless staser shot. “One thing I won’t hold on myself is a weapon,” he said with a huff. “Particularly when I’m not entirely confident that it is the best method of inoculation.” He pulled two packages from the pocket of his blazer. He tossed them both underhand toward Romana and the Doctor. “For the rest of you, oral medication. Twice daily for three days. Best you start to take it before the need to regenerate strikes. Thete, take note.” He inhaled a long breath. “Which also means, none of you can return to the house for at least two days in your own timeline.”

“It takes that long for any contagion to be suppressed by this medication,” Romana mused to herself more than she did the elder version of her husband.

The elder Braxiatel gave her a cheeky wink. “So in the meantime…”

“The meantime is none of your business,” she growled in reply with a hard look toward him. “Despite you being the later incarnation of my husband. Certain lines of time can be changed with you none the wiser to it.”

“Indeed.”

Rose hooked her hair behind her ear. “So I suppose this means we all stick around here and help you with rounding up the zombies?”

“Would much rather you didn’t,” he admitted with a light one-sided smirk. “As much as I do enjoy our time together, Rose – and you know that I do - this time I will ask that you …” he looked to his brother. “That you spend some much-needed time alone with Thete.” He looked back to her. “I think you both need a respite. Particularly with what’s coming.”

“And that is?” the Doctor asked with a light pinch in one eye.

Braxiatel smirked. “We have an entire army here, Thete.” He looked over his own shoulder toward the woodlands behind him. “Hundreds, thousands of Time Lords and Ladies betrayed by Rassilon.” He looked back to him, and then toward Romana. “Each of them ready to stand behind –”

“You speak as though you are suggesting civil war,” she interrupted him with a sharp growl. “I will not allow that. Not again, Braxiatel. _Never_ again.”

“I suggest no such thing,” he countered. “It is one of many options, of course, but by no means the only one.”

“It will come down to a vote,” Narvin offered flatly. “As it always does.” His eyes switched to Romana. “And if these Lords and Ladies know that they have a saviour within you, the one who saved them from the betrayal of Rassilon. Time will slide toward you.”

“It’s not why I allow and support it,” she warned low. “These are people. Our people. They _should_ be saved with no ulterior motive behind our efforts. Four hundred and fifty years of war, of fighting for survival…” She exhaled a shaking breath. “This is not how it ends for them. Any of them. I won’t use that to my advantage over Rassilon.”

“Which is precisely why you’ll get their support, Romana,” the Doctor offered gently. “Because you don’t do it for selfish reasons. I don’t know that you ever have.”

She laughed ruefully. “Don’t think me _that_ innocent, Doctor. I have behaved selfishly on far more occasions than I wish to admit to.” Her eyes shifted toward Leela. “And hurt those I care about for those same _very_ selfish reasons.”

“Show me someone who hasn’t,” he offered with a small smile. “There isn’t a single life form across the entire universe that can claim to be completely selfless.”

“Very true, Thete,” the younger Braxiatel agreed drowsily. It was clear that regeneration tiredness was on full approach, and he needed to fall into coma to properly complete his regeneration. “And so it’s on that note that I embrace my own selfishness. I tip my hat to you, Irving, say thank you for saving me, and head off for a little bit of R&R.”

“I will be in touch,” the elder Braxiatel said with a nod.

“No you will not,” Romana corrected him. 

“But I _must_ ,” he challenged. “Today has only granted you a very short respite. This is not over, it’s only just begun. You still need me.” He lifted his eyes to his younger self. “And so does he.”

“Then you communicate with me, or with your brother,” she warned him. “Not yourself. That has to stop.”

“As you wish,” he agreed with an almost facetious nod of his head. The calm and somewhat subservient posture of him quickly straightened up. A smile broke across his face. “So now that that’s all settled. You all best be off. Leela, Andred, I ask that you stay here with me for the time being.” He looked to his friend. “Narvin, I won’t ask…”

“I don’t need your permission,” he interrupted indignantly. “Nor your approval. I have – as is my understanding – quite a few travel capsules that need immediate containment and protection. With all due respect to you, Braxiatel – which is admittedly very little – I don’t trust you with that.”

“Charming.”

“I will make a brief return to Gallifrey to collect what I need…”

“You won’t speak with Rassilon,” Braxiatel warned him. “You won’t tell him we have a cure and a growing rebellious force.”

“Rassilon is very much about shooting the messenger,” he answered with a huff. “I will ensure that there is enough unquestionable interference that what happens here won’t be detected. Put a few whispers in the ears of certain council members to draw a few curious whispers and rumour mongering to detract from what happened today.”

“As you are so apt at doing.”

“Meanwhile,” he looked to the Doctor, to Rose, and back to the Doctor. “Keep her safe. He wants her, and he will pull apart the universe to find her. He does not consider you a threat to him at all.”

“Then that’s his mistake, isn’t it?” the Doctor said with a light smirk. “And definitely works to my advantage.”

~~oooOOOooo~

Having had such a full TARDIS earlier, and being in the presence of so many, for it to be just the two of them entering the console room accompanied only by their three wolves … it almost felt lonely.

The Doctor set his helmet on the ground and took a moment to take off the orange suit at the door. He watched Rose walk slowly toward the centre console. Watched as she traced the pads of her fingers along one of the wide coral branches. There was a contented smile of her face. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed to bask in the telepathic greeting offered by the ship.

It had been far too long since he’d had the pleasure of her company in the TARDIS. The last time had been fraught with ex-girlfriends and questionable science. It had been tense from start to finish, even before the fall into the pit that started all of the drama that took them here today. So to see her look so relaxed, and so happy, despite everything they were currently leaving behind…

…By the Gods it was wonderful.

He matched her smile, and even upped the ante with a full grin as he strode quickly up the ramp toward her. There was a wink in his eye as he moved across the controls and set the temporal coordinates for … for anywhere, really. They had two days until they were allowed to return home, and he wasn’t going to waste a second of it.

“We never did get to Barcelona, did we, Rose?”

She hummed in question and then gave him a smile. “No. We didn’t.”

“Feel like a quick trip?” He dramatically flipped up a lever and took a stride backward. The smile on his face reached about as far as Earth was from Gallifrey. “Barcelona, here we come.”

“Are you really set on Barcelona right now?” she questioned him with an unusual tone to her voice.

“You don’t want to go?”

“Oh, I do,” she breathed out with light excitement. “I really do.” She tipped her ear to her shoulder. “But I was really kind’ve hoping that right now, we could just float in the vortex, or in space, for a bit. No destination, no need to visit anywhere…”

“But that’s a bit boring, don’t you think?” he said with a wrinkle in his nose and distaste in his voice. “Brax said two days in out timeline,” he reminded her. “Two days can get pretty boring if we spend it all in here when we have the entire universe – all time and space – at our disposal.”

Rose stepped toward him. There was a light and almost unsure posture in her gait, and she struggled to meet his eyes as she let her finger trail over the angles of his Blazer lapel. “I was really kind’ve hoping that we could. You know…”

Her unsure pause gave him the slightest tic of curiosity in his eye. The curiosity fled toward understanding and full acquiescence to her every single whim and desire when she undid the tie around his neck, and slowly started to unbutton his oxford. His voice fell low and slightly husky. “We could, what, Rose?”

Her eyes still didn’t meet his. They seemed more focused on the way her fingers popped one button after the other to reveal the thin white undershirt beneath them. “I think it’s time, Doctor.”

“Time for what?” he pressed gently with only the slightest sigh of expectation. “Tell me what you need, Rose. It’s yours.”

That made her smile – wide. With a light lift in her eyes to meet his, she grasped each side of his half-unbuttoned shirt and grunted as she yanked it wide open, spraying the remaining fastened resin buttons to the ground at their feet.

“I want you to make me howl,” she demanded on a breathy voice that hissed through her teeth. “Remind me who we were, who we are, and who we always will be.” She pulled hard on the fabric she still had held in her hands to tug him closer toward her. She didn’t pull him into a desperate and passionate snog, as he expected. Instead, she held him just short of closing the distance between them to huff against his lips. “Unless, of course, you’d prefer Barcelona…”

His arms snapped tight around her back and he grunted into a growl as he squeezed hard enough to lift her feet from the ground. He extended one arm to flick a switch on the console, and then turned abruptly to walk the two of them toward the corridor. She was still held against him chest to chest. Her legs dangled lifelessly down either side of his. “Barcelona can wait.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	31. Breakfast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor and Rose reconnect - then go for breakfast on a remote Alien Pavilion...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has taken too long to get here, but here is part one of my promise to my wonderful Lego Artist to write them a wee arc based upon her Lego design and storyboard. (I really want to post a link to your art, but won't do it without your permission. Please drop a link to your work in my comments section so our readers can see what prompted this!! -- that and it's just really amazing work!)
> 
> I certainly hope this will not be a disappointment... do poke me if I'm heading too far off your track (I'm rather good at doing that).
> 
> Oh, as a warning. The beginning part of this chapter is fluff... plan and simple sappy fluff smoochie woochie rot your teeth kind've stuff. Light raciness, I suppose, but nothing worse than you'll see on primetime TV (quite less than that, actually).... You have been warned...
> 
> Have a very glorious weekend.... see you next week!

~~oooOOOooo~~

The flat of his hand slapped hard at the headboard and his fingers curled around the top edge of it as a long cry bellowed out from the very back of his throat. He barely heard the first two syllables of his Gallifreyan name howled out beneath him, although he knew beyond all doubt that the wailing sound of it twisted and danced perfectly within his own cry.

Both sounds petered out slowly into gasping, hard breaths panted out by the two of them. He hovered for a moment to catch his breath and it was when he tasted the salty flavour of his own sweat dripping down from his nose to his lips that he finally found the energy to fall heavily off to the side. He fell hard on his side and rolled onto his back, still gasping for breath when he lifted an arm to shield his eyes with his forearm.

“Well,” Rose managed out with a dry croak in her voice. Her hand was loosely fisted in the small valley between her breasts. Like the Doctor beside her, she struggled to catch her breath and calm the excessive beating of her heart below her fist. “That. That was…”

“Mission accomplished,” he muttered cheekily with a dry chuckle. 

She rolled her head to look at him. “What mission is that?”

He didn’t remove his arm from his eyes but used the other to lightly swat the mattress to find hers. He threaded his fingers through hers and held tightly. “To make you howl,” he said with a wide toothy grin. “I counted at least three of them.” He swallowed over a dry tongue. “Quite surprised the kids didn’t join in.”

“Oh shut up, she said with a breathy chuckle. “Never change, do you? No matter the body you’re in, you’re always thinking you’re so impressive.”

He remained shielded from the light and bore a wide smile. The wink he gave underneath his forearm was visible in the light crinkle at its corner. “That’s because I _am_ so impressive.”

“And so very humble about it as well.”

He let the arm finally fall from his eyes and rolled his head to look at her. There was a light pinch in his brow as his eyes searched hers. “Why? You didn’t find it impressive?”

“Never said that,” she said with a laugh. “Really. That was … something else…” She gulped and tried not to focus on the wide grin of self pride he wore across his cheeks. “We’ve done a lot of this, Doctor.” Her eyes widened to think about it. “A _lot_.” She swallowed and shook her head. “But that? That. Wow. That was very different to either of the last you’s…”

“ _Good_ different, or _bad_ different?”

There was insecurity in his question, which she found curious. He had no need to be. She gave him a smile. “Just… _Different_.”

His expression fell and his eyes dropped from hers. There was as much petulance as disappointment in his voice. “Well that isn’t very encouraging is it?” He writhed just slightly on the mattress, his muscles still jelly and basically non-responsive. “Give me a moment to recover, and I’ll give you an experience to rival any of them.”

Rose had to chuckle at that, didn’t she? She lifted her eyes to the ceiling and huffed out a laugh. “Are you unique amongst your species and this competition you seem to have against yourself; or is it a general trait amongst your people?” She pressed her finger against his lips to prevent him from answering what was really just a hypothetical question and gave him a light hush. “ _Good_ different, Doctor. Very, very good, yeah?” A smile spread across her cheeks. “No man before you had me _howling_ in the way you just did.”

A happy sound emanated from the back of his throat and he smiled against her finger. His hand flew up to snatch that hand in his, and he kissed against her palm. “That’s good to hear, because if I’m being honest with you, Rose…” He chuckled out lightly and let both of their hands fall back to the mattress. “I don’t think I can manage another round right now.” He writhed a little. “Not sure I can even walk.”

Rose chuckled and levered herself up to a seated position. She gave him a cheeky look down along her shoulder. “Not so impressive after all, are you?”

“Hey,” he coughed out. “It’s been a little while, okay? And certainly not in _this_ body.” He frowned a little. “Some of these muscles are sadly out of use.” When she slid off the bed and stretched up tall and high beside him, completely naked and lit only by the glow of the swirling constellations above their heads, he let out a long and appreciative moan that spoke of his unworthiness of her. “By the Gods, Rose. You are magnificent.”

And in his eyes, she was. 

Rose didn’t have the tight and skinny physique of the Hollywood and Instagram worlds. She didn’t have rock hard abs and perfectly perky grapefruit-shaped double-D breasts, nor did she have Botox swollen lips and false magnetic eyelashes. She did, however, have the most adorable little soft rounded paunch in her lower belly that she’d not been able to get rid of since being pregnant with Mark. Her breasts had lost their youthful perkiness and had stopped supporting themselves shortly after weaning their son from feeding. Her hips, buttocks, thighs and her lower belly sported the silvery stripes of skin stretched to it’s limit…

…And in his eyes, she had never looked as visually stunning to him as she did right now. 

“Just beautiful,” he breathed out.

She chuckled with light embarrassment and curled her arms around herself with light awkwardness to his such focused attention. There was a light and uncomfortable giggle in her voice. “Oh. Yeah, thanks. I should probably find some time to go to the gym or something.” She stooped to locate her shirt. “I’ll just cover up, yeah?”

“Don’t you dare,” he breathed out as he quickly scuffled across the bed to pull to his feet at her side. He quickly moved toward her, cupping her elbows in his hands to pull her hands from covering herself. “Don’t ever hide yourself from me.”

“Doctor,” she whined with light embarrassment. “Please.”

“I sculpted you,” he said to her in a light, but firm voice. “Remember that? Back in Rome? I sculpted a Goddess in your image. I took great pleasure, and spent such intense focus on sculpting your body. Every part of you seared so deeply inside my mind that I could sculpt you from memory alone…” He cupped her cheek. “Your beautiful face.” He breathed out reverently. “I thought you were so beautiful back then, Rose. So brilliant and uniquely perfect.”

She smiled with thanks and lowered her head with light shyness. “Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. Before havin’ kids destroyed me completely…”

He pressed his finger to her lips. “Let me finish,” he implored her gently. “I sculpted every perfect part of you with utmost reverence, never once thinking that I would ever find anything in this entire universe more beautiful than the figure I was sculpting at that moment.” He drew his finger heavily down her lips, drawing her plump lower lip down enough to show her teeth before releasing it to bounce back up against the other. “But I was wrong. So wrong. That wasn’t perfection. Far from it, in fact.”

Her brows pulled together and she let out the smallest of whimpers when his hands met with her waist and he lightly coaxed her into a turn. She bit at her lip as he lightly guided her toward the bed.

“Perfection,” he breathed out with awe in his voice. “Is who you are now.” He cupped her face and kissed her hard on the mouth, releasing her with a pop. “Your lips. Perfect.” He dipped his head to press a kiss to each of her breasts. “These. Both of them. Perfect.” He exhaled against one. “So. _So_ perfect.”

She gave a slight whimper at his affections and faltered backward to end up sitting on the mattress. She wanted to argue with him, absolutely she did, but she knew better than to even try…

…And, heck, didn’t she need to hear him say these words to her; to know that he still adored her despite her flaws. She spoke his name in a sigh and leaned backward with her back down along the mattress. Her fingers stroked along his arms as he shifted into a penitent position on his knees between her legs.

“I wish you could see you like I do.” He pressed a kiss to her hip bone, and the silvery lines that curled lightly around them. “And how perfect every part of you is to me. Even these. Oh, Rose, especially these.” 

His lips dragged across her skin, from her hip to the small rise in her belly. He suckled as much as kissed against the soft pooch that she hated so much. “I love this,” he vowed as he pressed kiss after kiss from hip to hip. “You can’t imagine just how much I love this part of you, and what it means to me that you have it.”

She drawled out an indecipherable series of syllables and writhed her shoulders on the mattress. He looked up along her belly and through the valley of her breasts and noted the pinkening of her cheeks and the drop of her jaw as she exhaled out a quietly desperate sigh.

“My hearts beat for you,” he assured her. “And I truly don’t think you understand just how much I not only love you, Rose, but how much I absolutely revere you. More than anything, including time herself.” He shifted his mouth to kiss again at her belly and shifted his focus and his lips lower. “So maybe its about time I show you just how much I truly worship you, hmmm?”

~~oooOOOooo~~

It was a bustling and noisy marketplace that met the Doctor and Rose at the doors of the TARDIS once they’d finally decided it was finally time to venture out. Braxiatel had given them a minimum quarantine period of two days from the first dosage of the medication, and the pair of them had maxed out that time frame without an ounce of guilt shared between them. They were currently at the 52-hour mark from leaving Estrail, but only at a mere 49 hours after taking the first set of pills. Much of that time had been spent rediscovering one another in both the physical and telepathic senses, or sleeping off exhaustion, which left very little time for nutrition. So, with that in mind, and with the dangerously-low-sugar-level tremors he could see in his wife’s shoulders, the Doctor had insisted that they stop for a quick breakfast on their way back to London.

“Welcome to the planet Kucails,” he chirped out with a wide grin as he stepped off an orange-coloured landing pad and onto light grey stone of the planet surface. He had his hands in his trouser pockets and looked down to dig the toe of his Converse into the gravel-like surface that lay beyond his TARDIS and led to the main marketplace. “Third planet in the Thani solar system. One of only two inhabited planets in this solar system, actually.” His brows lifted and he looked up ahead of him. “Which is about double the size of your system.” One side of his face scrunched up. “Well, a little more than double, but not quite triple. 22 planets in all – including the three dwarf planets.” 

He held his hand to her. “Come on, Rose. Stop for a quick breakfast, and then head back home in time for the school run.”

“Is it safe?” she queried as she slipped her hand into his and used his hold to steady her as she slipped on a pair of shoes.

“I know you’re being playful and all, Rose,” he said with a light huff. “But at some point I will stop trying not to take offence to it and express just how offended I really am when you ask me that – with all of the stereotypical dramatics I see you sharing on your YouTube and Facebook pages.”

She let out an exclamation of surprise. “You have facebook?”

“The TARDIS does,” he answered with a shrug. “And I hijack her account from time to time to stalk you.”

“I’m going to have to friend her,” Rose said with a chuckle. Her eyes widened. “Does she post? Like, can she talk to us that way?”

“I’m afraid not.” He shook his head slowly. “She’s watching. That’s all. Watching all of you who have travelled with me. Making sure you’re safe and well. Letting me know if I need to drop in and lend a hand.” He winked and gave her had a tug. “And you’re already a friend of hers.”

“Really?” she queried. “What’s her username?”

“Idris,” he answered with a shrug. “Not quite sure how she same up with that one, but she did. Quite like it, actually. Anyway, come on out, Rose. I assure you it’s perfectly safe for you here.”

“Yeah, I’ll believe it once we’ve left.” Rose stepped out of the TARDIS and hovered in the doorway a moment as she took a look around her. “Looks a bit like a marketplace,” she remarked with a smile. 

“That’s because it is,” he answered with a shrug. He tightened the hold of his hand around hers and led them in a slow walk through a wide alleyway of light gray gravel that led them in between two double-storey buildings of Cream and ochre. 

Rose’s eyes were wide with wonder as she tucked her hair behind her ear with the hook of one finger and took in all that surrounded them. The first thing she noted was that the bulk of the people milling about were all basically humanoid. There were random variations between them all, of course, and there were the odd truly alien looking creatures wandering about as well.

“So the Kucailians…?”

“They prefer to be referred to as the Kucail,” he corrected her. “There is a planet in a neighbouring solar system known as Kucaili, and they tend to go by Kucailian.” He let out a bit of a sigh. “They obviously don’t get along all that well, so mixing them up can be quite – how should I say this…?”

“We’ll end up in gaol or something,” Rose ventured. “Head on a spike kind’ve thing?”

He chuckled. “Not quite to that extreme – unless the laws have changed recently.” His lips pursed outward and his brows knitted together. “Best we don’t find out.”

“Works for me,” she sang. “So? What brings us to Kucail, anyway?”

“Breakfast,” he cheered with a wide grin. “Best Croissants and Pretzels in the universe are in a patio café called Bivies, which is Kucail for twisted knot. Oh. You just wait until you try them, Rose, not too flaky or greasy for the former, and not to heavy on the latter.” He lifted his eyes to the sky at the sound of a low flying aircraft hovering overhead. “Which makes this a very popular destination for a take-out snacks by local interplanetary traders.”

Rose shielded her eyes with her forearm as she looked upward to the ship that looked to want to land in the middle of the square. “Is he gonna land? Right here, in the market?”

He nodded with a shrug. “Not out of the ordinary here, I’m afraid. Pedestrians beware the landing gear of random aircraft crushing you from above.”

“No iPhone Zombies ‘round here, I’d expect,” she murmured with a slight smirk.

“I don’t know if I should be thankful to not know what you’re talking about, or be curious for an explanation,” he said with wide eyes that were as worried as they were curious. “But when you refer to them as Zombies, and given where we’ve just come from…” He tugged on her hand to lead them onto a patio and the only vacant table he could see. “Quick, before anyone else sees it.”

“See’s what?” she gasped with a laugh, thrilled to be dragged on yet another fun adventure of sorts. Oh, how she’d missed the thrill of the run.

“Our table!” he called out urgently. “Come on, Rose. Can’t miss this seat – perfect for people watching!”

“Well we can’t have that, now, can we?”

He let go of Rose’s hand and curled himself around another couple that were looking to procure the same seat. He plopped down heavily into one of the seats with enough force for it to scrape a food few inches backward and offered a grin of apology to the other couple. “Sorry,” he chirped. “But the wife and I, we had a reservation.”

The female of the pair looked upon the Doctor with a look of utter disgust and disdain, but he showed no reaction to it except to smile a toothy grin.

“Such rudeness,” she huffed with a lift in her eyes. 

“What do you expect from a Gallifreyan,” her mate agreed with a sniff of arrogance. “Rude and obnoxious creatures, that entire planet.”

“Well that’s a bit rude,” he muttered with a shrug. “I do have my non-obnoxious moments.”

“You think Gallifreyans are rude,” Rose snorted with indignance from behind them. “Wait till you meet the Human.”

Both of them staggered a startled step backward. She held her hand at her chest with disgust and horror, he just looked mortified.

Rose lifted a brow and slowly a smile spread across her cheeks at the mortification of these two people. She leaned lightly forward and said: “Boo!” She erupted into laughter at a shrill screech from the female, and then the sound of scarpering feet as they both took off in fear. She shook her head and walked around the table, dropping heavily into the chair across from the Doctor. “Friends of yours?”

He rolled his eyes and leaned forward in a slump, folding both arms to lean down on the tabletop. “No. They’re a pair of Thanians. From the planet Thani in a neighboring solar system to Gallifrey, inside the constellation of Kasterborous.” He looked off to one side. “Their species are as arrogant and self important as the Time Lords are, but with far less reason to be that way except envy. Despite efforts, they’ve been unable to rise to become one of the main Temporal Powers.” He flicked his eyes to hers. “They blame Gallifrey for that, of course. Accuse our kind of …” he sat back in his chair and swirled his finger in the air with a turn of his wrist. “Withholding technology and denying them the ability to access the appropriate temporal archives…”

“Which you guys are, I suspect,” Rose said without judgement as she perused a laminated one-page menu. “Right?”

“Well yes, but that’s really beside the point.”

“Not really,” she chuckled without looking up. “The Time Lords are doing exactly what they’re being accused of.”

“Some people just shouldn’t have access to it, Rose.”

“Not saying they should. I mean, can you imagine Earth as it is right now getting that…” She lifted her eyes and her words stopped immediately upon seeing a very familiar face happily enjoying an icecream at the next table over from them. Her hands flew to cover her mouth as she drew in a startled and worried breath. “Oh my God.”

The Doctor’s attention, and his protective streak rose within him immediately. He sat up quickly and looked at her with hard eyes of question. He needed to make sure she was okay before he leapt into action. “Rose?”

Her eyes watered as they flicked toward him. “Doctor. You. You’re here.” She drew in a shaking breath. “I mean another one of you.”

He winced at that. Her reaction, the watering of her eyes, and the almost audible breaking of her heart meant it could be only the one version of him. His eyes slowly dropped in a blink and he exhaled almost sadly. The two of them had just managed to cross the most important threshold of their stumbling relationship – please say this wasn’t going to throw them back to square one.

“Which me?” he asked quietly. 

“Him,” she answered with a shudder in her shoulders. “The … the one who…”

“Who loved you so much he made you his wife,” he conceded almost sadly. He twisted in his chair in a movement he tried desperately to make look as casual as possible. He pressed his cheek into his shoulder and looked backward toward the nearing table. 

Not that he doubted Rose’s identification of him in any way at all, of course, but it was prudent for him to make a beyond-all-doubt identification of his own. He didn’t quite remember visiting Kucail during his Eighth incarnation – but then again, quite a vast amount of information about that incarnation was missing from his memories. His brother would call it: Spotty at best.

One thing he could quickly determine, however, was that at this juncture in his younger self’s timeline, he had no memory of his wife and children. He could tell by the slightly aged, slightly sunken features that this man was nearing the Time War. A century passed from the Bad Wolf incident at the Capitol, decades since Charley … this man was on his way to meet Lucie.

“He doesn’t know you,” he managed out with a croak in his voice.

“B-Before or after?”

Oh, how could he tell her this was after Bad Wolf? How could he possibly admit to her that despite the immense love, devotion, and blind reverence he had for her, she was so easily forgotten? Oh, of course, she knew it had happened. She’d been told of it…

…But that didn’t mean she had to see it, or even experience it. Her heart didn’t need that level of breakage. He wouldn’t allow it.

“Before,” he lied with far too much ease. 

“But the looks so much older,” she breathed out. “Like he has the weight of it all on him.”

He turned back to her, reaching out a hand to grasp at one of hers. “Before I met you, Rose….” He sighed out hard. “I had a lot of heartache before you ended up on my TARDIS. My hearts were broken. I’d lost so … so much.”

“Lungbarrow,” she breathed out knowingly. “And your family?”

That would work. It wasn’t a lie that Lungbarrow hurt him deeply, and it was still aching his hearts when he met Rose. 

It just wasn’t in the forefront of the man seated at that table….

He nodded slowly. “That was a hard time for me.” He looked down his shoulder to gesture toward his younger self. “Add to that a hard, and very confusing regeneration into that man. The toughest regeneration of all of them so far.” he looked back to her, lifting his hand to touch at her cheek with his fingertips. “You came into my life right when I needed you the most.” His mouth tipped up into a smile. “Like you did with the next me.” His smile fell to a reverent expression that was almost pained. “And both of them, Rose. You saved them both.”

“Oh, I just want to hug him,” she breathed out empathetically. “Tell him that everything will be alright, and that he’s loved. So deeply loved.”

“That would be the most dangerous thing for him to hear right now,” he whispered more to himself than to her. He rubbed at his thighs and slowly drew to a stand. “Come on. Let’s swap seats. That way you won’t have to look at him.”

“I won’t test my resolve, you mean,” she corrected with a smile. “I understand the timelines, Doctor. I promise you I won’t do anything to let him know who we are to each other…”

“Oh Rose,” a Northern voice said with a deep chuckle of amusement from the patio railing beside them. “I already know.”


	32. Party Crashing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three Doctors and one Rose ... You don't want to know what I'm thinking right now. ... Though you probably are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No chappy yesterday as I had another day where I just couldn't get the chapter to work at all. Slept on it, made a decision, then went back at it today.
> 
> I can't possibly have three Doctors all in the same place and not have fun with them all, right? I believe that's what was holding me back..
> 
> I am still within the criteria originally set forth by our beautiful Lego artist ... and her main criteria is still going to be met. I just couldn't resist a little something something first...
> 
> Gosh, I've missed Eight...
> 
> I very much hope you enjoy. 
> 
> And just what could Brax's big secret be that he doesn't want Thete to know? Many possibilities there....

~~oooOOOOooo~~

At the sound of the Northern accent of his previous self, the Doctor – the Tenth incarnation of himself – let out a long groan and covered his face in his palm. He _really_ didn’t want to see just what expression would cross his wife’s face, whether or not her face would lengthen into that wide open, hopelessly in love look she often gave him in that body, or if it would be filled with frustration and disappointment that, yet again, he’d cocked up their landing…

“Hello Doctor,” he heard her say with gentle fondness toward his younger self. “Would love to catch up, but there’s something I need to address with your older self first. Could you give me a moment?” There was light humour in her tone, which was a positive of sorts, but he wasn’t yet prepared to remove the palm that covered his face just yet.

The sniff and snort he heard from his younger self was immediately recognisable to him and he didn’t need to look at him at all to know what he was thinking or was expression he had on his face. He was that man once; he knew each and every possible expression of reaction that old face could manage. He would bet a regeneration that _that_ old face was set in a bit of a smirk hidden by a light scowl of disappointment in himself. There would be the slightest and almost imperceptible shake in his head as he folded his arms across his chest and propped his forearms down on the railing in front of him in a lean.

So with his hand still over his face, he held up the finger of the other to him. “Not a word from you,” he muttered around his wrist. “Not _one_ word.”

Nine hummed. “Got more’n one in mind, Doctor.”

“Oh I don’t doubt it,” he replied with a deep sigh as he finally let his hand fall from his face. He looked to Rose with hopelessness in his posture. “Rose…”

Whatever emotion Rose was experiencing right now, she had it carefully shielded behind a neutral façade. Her posture was only slightly more readable than her face, but not by much. She was still seated at the table, in perfect view to his even younger self – should he feel so inclined to watch – which was likely. Her arms were folded and leaned on the tabletop much like the man standing over the railing beside her. Her head was slightly tilted in a rather curious manner.

“So, Doctor,” she began gently with little to no emotion in her voice. “Back on Estrail, Brax suggested that it might be a good idea for you to take a bit of a refresher course on how to correctly use the time travel feature on the TARDIS.”

“Actually,” he corrected with a light slouch. “It wasn’t a _suggestion_ at all. He was being facetious in an attempt to counter off my own rudeness – “

“Because you were trying to get rid of him,” she finished with a huff. “Yes. I know. But you know what they say: Many a true word is spoken in jest…”

“I don’t know that Brax has ever actually spoken a true word in any of his lives,” he defended indignantly.

“Ahh,” she breathed with a nod. “So, when he says that me and the kids are in his hearts that’s not true?”

“You know what I mean…”

“Hold on,” Nine injected quickly into the conversation. There was definite curiosity in his voice as he straightened up, gripped at the top of the railing and climbed over the top of it. His lanky form was able to clear the top of the hip-height railing easily enough, but there was the slightest of stumbles as the lower hem of his jacket caught on a decorative post topper in between railing panels. He recovered with a side smile and a roll in his eyes as he released his jacket from the bauble. “Dignified, that was.”

“Very,” Rose said with a chuckle as she gestured toward a spare seat at their table. “Do sit. Grab a coffee and a croissant with us.”

“Please don’t,” Ten said with a deep, huffed, sigh.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he remarked with a wink and a smile. He dragged the chair out with his foot and flopped heavily into it. He skidded the chair across the floor to seat himself a little closer to Rose than his elder self was and thread an arm across the back of her chair around her shoulders.

“So?” he began with a look toward Rose. “Did I hear you mention the name Brax?”

She let out a sound that indicated she had just realised she made an error and looked to her current Doctor with apology in her expression. “Sorry. Wasn’t thinking…”

“It’s okay,” he assured her with a wave of his hand. “I don’t actually remember this part of my timeline, so I suspect I forced myself to suppress the memories of it.” He looked to his younger self and let out a sigh. “So I can count on you to…” He rolled his eyes. “Forget?”

“Will it hurt the timelines if I don’t?”

“Might make you less grumpy,” Rose said with a snicker as she leaned into him lightly. 

“But you like me all gruff and grumpy, don’t you?” he teased with a snicker and a light lean in toward her. “This one…” He gestured toward his next incarnation with a flick of his ear toward him. “Has he got the gruff and grumpy, too?”

She hummed a happy sound. “Oh, he’s more excitable puppy.” Her lips pursed. “With a really nasty bite if you step on his tail…”

Ten rolled his eyes with affront and indignance. “As you are so very prone to saying, Rose: _He_ is over here. If you want to ask about _me_ , then ask _me_.” He then looked to his younger self. He gave him a glare and gestured to the fingers of the hand that was toying with the wisps of hair that had escaped Rose’s messy bun. “Now if you don’t mind. You have your own Rose, so keep your hands off mine.”

“Speaking of,” Rose queried with a look around. “Where am I?”

Nine slumped back in his seat. He stopped playing with Rose’s hair but didn’t remove his arm from the back of her chair. “Visiting your mother,” he admitted with a shrug and sight disdain in his voice. “It’s Bev’s birthday or somethin’, and I didn’t feel like attendin’ any parties where I’m the only bloke in room with a bunch of single women on the prowl.” He held back his shudder and thumbed at the edge of his mouth. “We’re running low on bananas, so I decided to drop by here and pick up a shipment.” He winked at her. “Best bananas in the universe, right here.”

Rose’s brows were high on her forehead and she looked to her husband. “Seems like this is the place that has the best of everything.”

Ten shrugged. “As I said, Kucails is a merchant planet. Can’t be wholly successful if your products aren’t up to scratch.” He reached across the table to take her hand in his. His thumb stroked across the large diamond that graced the fourth finger of her left hand. “Was hoping to pick up something to match this,” he admitted softly. He lifted his eyes to hers and there was the shiest of expressions within his gaze. “To celebrate, you know…” He smiled instead of finishing the thought.

She hummed a small giggle. “Well. If I knew it was _that_ easy to get new jewellery…” She lifted just slightly up to lean across the table. Her hand cupped at his cheek to draw him closer to her. “I don’t need presents, Doctor,” she breathed out against his mouth. “Just love me, yeah? Me and the kids. That’s all I ask.”

“In that case, your wish is my very eager command,” he replied with a smile. He stood to close the distance between them, to press a kiss to her lightly puckered lips, but managed only to kiss the air as she was pulled back rather forcibly by his younger self. His eyes flashed wide with anger to see the stunned look in his wife’s eyes as she fell back heavily into her chair. He snapped a glare toward Nine. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Two things,” he answered somewhat gruffly, irritation in his tone. “One: Stopping myself from vomiting. And two…” He had Rose’s wrist in his, and although he looked to be rough, his hold was really quite gentle and tender on her. “Amongst the many questions I have right now – and there are a lot – I’m going to start with: where’d you find this? I hunted for this thing for months to give to her. Thought it gone for good.”

“You manhandle our wife,” Ten snarled angrily. “And you want me to answer your questions?” He pushed himself up to a stand with a slap of his hand on the tabletop. “What I should do is put you on the ground.”

“And therein lies another question,” he stated with his brows high. Those brows fell to a frown. “And I didn’t manhandle her. I merely guided her to a seat.” He looked to Rose, who looked a mix between amused and stunned. “I wasn’t rough with you, was I?”

“Ehm, no,” she half stammered. “Not as such. But you did startle me.” She looked up to Ten and raised her hand to ask calm. “It’s okay, Doctor. I forgot how possessive you could get when you were him.”

“That isn’t possessive,” Ten argued, his ire still high. “That’s just…”

“Is there a problem here?” a new voice smoothly entered into the conversation. There was protectiveness in this tone, although not necessarily one that held any familiarity toward the one he was trying to protect. The Eighth version of the Doctor looked toward Rose with an expression that told her he was ready for whatever level of chivalry she might desire. “Are these men being a bother to you?”

Rose held back the whimper that was seated in the back of her throat. His stormy blue eyes, his smooth and kind voice, and that look that said he’d destroy universes if she dared shed a tear at all, it took her back to Gallifrey faster than any trip in a TARDIS ever could…

…even _if_ it was piloted by a Time Lord who had a clue about where he was actually going...

“I’m okay,” she assured him with a weak smile. She pulled her phone from her hip pocket and sighed as she thumbed to the messages screen and opened her message log to her Brother in Law. 

“Are you quite sure?” he pressed with a slow look at each of the two men seated with her. “I heard arguing, and I see that you seem to be in the very thick of it.”

“I usually am,” she admitted with a sigh and a long-suffering smile. She offered him a more genuine smile as she did a rather short panoramic scan that included the three of them. “Say cheese.”

Ten’s eyes narrowed at her. “What’re you doing, Rose? Who are you sending that to?”

“Nothing, Doctor, and no one,” she groused as she typed in a five- word message to add to the photograph. She gave him a look and pressed send. With a welcoming smile she set the phone face-down on the table, looked toward Eight, and gestured toward the only remaining vacant seat. “Please, Doctor, take a seat. Join us.?”

“I would be delighted to,” Eight said affectionately as he accepted the invitation and took a seat next to Ten. “If only to protect you from the brute seated next to you.” He looked toward Nine with a somewhat displeased expression. “And just how far ahead of me are you, then?” He held a finger up to Ten when he made a pained sound but kept his eyes on Nine. “And at what juncture do we stop being a gentleman toward the fairer sex?”

“Not sure that we ever actually were what one could call a _gentleman_ ,” he answered with a shrug. “And callin’ them the _Fairer_ _Sex_ kind’ve proves that, don’t you think?” He made a gesture with his hand that was like a boat atop a wave. “I can feel the tremor moving along the lines of the feminist movement heading in a tidal wave toward the Doctor for his benevolent sexism.”

“Oh, don’t start,” Rose warned with a sigh. She gave him an affectionate smile. “Especially when you’re the most chivalrous of the three of you.”

“How very sweet of you to say,” he replied with a small smile and an extension of his arm across the back of her chair. “But, please, don’t ever say that again.” He straightened a little and gave her a wink. “I have a reputation to uphold, after all.”

Ten snorted. “Oh yes. Many, _many_ reputations…”

“Just remember,” Nine warned him with a lift of his finger. “Any reputation I have belongs to you as well. Might be good of you to remember that if you want to take that particular pathway of snark on this encounter of ours.”

Rose chuckled with a shake of her head and looked toward the man who had loved her so much that he’d made her his wife. Her smile was warm and genuine but held back the sadness she felt toward their parting. She held out her hand to him. “I’m Rose,” she introduced gently. “Future companion.”

He took her hand in his, but didn’t shake it. Instead he held her fingers in his hand and analysed the vivid blue Gallifreyan diamond that sparkled brilliantly in the sunlight. He hummed a curious sound and shifted his stormy blue eyes toward hers. “Something tells me you are very much more than just a companion.” His eyes fell to the diamond once more. “This was my mother’s ring, gifted to her by my father when he requested their bond.”

She had expected him to drop her hand at that point and drop the matter, but he maintained a tender hold of her fingers. He drew the pad of his thumb along the top facet of the diamond. “I have been looking for this. Well, that is to say that I _had_ been looking for it. About twenty of so years ago when…” He paused when the eldest version of himself cleared his throat with urgency. He looked toward him and caught the warning in his eyes and the slight and almost perceptible shake of his head. 

“When what, Doctor?” she pressed without looking toward her current Doctor.

“When my brother asked for it,” he answered slowly, his eyes still on Ten. 

“Brax?” Rose confirmed with her brows high. She couldn’t think of any reason he’d want it. He was the one who told the Doctor to give the ring to her in the first place.

Eight smiled and finally released her hand. He leaned his forearms down on the table and waggled his brows just slightly with curiosity. “You’ve met him?”

“Met him?” she answered with a sigh and a smile. “Oh, Doctor. Practically _lived_ with him over the past few years.” She lifted her eyes to the sky. “Well, in _my_ timeline at least.” She lowered her eyes again to his. “He’s my best friend.”

Eight seemed slightly taken aback by that. “Brax is friends – with a human?” He looked to his eldest self with question inside his wide eyes and was greeted with a smirk and shrug that displayed the same level of confusion on that. He frowned slightly at it and looked back to Rose. “I don’t know that I completely buy into that. Sorry to say this, Rose, but he has no time or care at all for your species.”

Boney M’s Daddy Cool sang out from Rose’s phone. She smirked and held it up to Eight’s questioning eyes. A wallpaper picture of her first incarnation of Brax adjusting his cuffs standing in the hallway of her home on Gallifrey took up the full screen. “Speak of the Devil.”

He breathed out a long word of the negative when she winked at him and pressed the little green button to connect the call. She held the phone to her ear. “Hey Brax. Got my picture?”

“Of course,” Ten moaned out with a petulant roll in his eyes. “You sent it to _him_. Why am I not surprised?”

Rose’s eyes widened with shock at the voice on the other end. “Oh. Romana! Sorry, I thought you were Brax…” She felt three sets of curious eyes on her and shrank just slightly under their varying stares. “Ehm. So, where’s Brax?” Her shrink shifted to amusement. “Oh. Okay. _Regeneration_ coma, yeah, right. Is _that_ what you’re calling it now?”

She bellowed out a laugh at the response and rose to a stand. “Excuse me,” she said with apology to the three men at the table. “I’ll take this over here.”

All three men watched with wide eyes and an odd-kind of silence as Rose took her phone conversation to a quiet place around the corner. Once she was out of earshot – but still within sight – both Eight and Nine shot questioning glances toward their eldest self.

“I imagine you both have questions,” he said with a sigh. The sigh shifted to a shrug as he set his own phone on the tabletop, face up to show that he’d covertly sent the message that prompted the call to Rose’s phone. He leaned forward with his elbows and forearms on the table. “Which I’ll answer, but for now.” He exhaled. “If we’re doing this happy incarnations get together thing, I need to lay down some ground rules.”

“Since when have we needed rules?” Nine said with an indignant sniff. “And since when has it ever been a _happy_ get together when we cross paths?”

“Since saying the wrong thing will upset our wife,” he answered shortly. His eyes flicked to the youngest of the three of them. “And the biggest rule of them all is: Don’t mention Charley. At all. Not a hint, and not a whisper of her name. Am I understood?”

“Not really,” Eight answered with a pinch in one eye. “As this is my first meeting of the woman who in my future becomes my wife…” He stumbled to a stop at a strange sound from the eldest of them. His words became slow. “I will expect that she understands that she is not my first love.” He thought about that. “Not even my second, nor my third, if I’m being honest about my hearts to this point in my lives.”

“Three?” Nine questioned with wide eyes. “Is there one I’ve forgotten about?” He looked to Ten. “Do you recall…?”

Ten shook his head, his expression as confused as his younger self. Eight merely shrugged. “I’ve got a sense of something,” he admitted. “More than just Phen and Charley…” he squinted as he thought hard about it. Then shuddered with a shake in his head. “I don’t know. Shoddy incarnation this one for the memory. Feels like there should be someone in between, but, who knows?”

“He’s right,” Nine admitted with an equally perplexed expression. “I feel it, too. Like I’m missing something … or some _one .._. from that incarnation.” He shrugged. “Bit of a romantic in that incarnation, I suppose. Perhaps a dalliance that was against the will of the universe.”

“A married woman?” Eight questioned with a lengthened face. He quickly closed up to a grimace and shook his head. “No. Wouldn’t do _that_ knowingly.” He rubbed the flat of his hand in between his hearts. “Though I do feel something in here.”

“Best you don’t dwell on it,” Ten warned with worry. Thinking back, he was felt the same sense inside him for much of his Eighth incarnation. He understood it now, but back then …?

Nine slouched back heavily in the chair. Once again, his arm spread across the back of what was Rose’s chair. “Care to fill me in on how Rose knows Romana and Brax?” he asked. “For rather obvious reasons, I’d think that was impossible.”

“Impossible why?” Eight queried. 

“No reason that’s important to you,” he answered with a warning look.

“Think it might be important to me,” he shot back. “Curious to understand why you think not being able to reach out to my brother or one of my best friends doesn’t concern me at all.”

“Right now, it doesn’t.” He looked toward Ten. “So?”

“They’re family,” he answered with a shrug. “Rose is my wife. Why wouldn’t they meet?” He flicked up a finger in warning. “He’s not there, yet, so be careful.”

“They survived,” he breathed out with hope in his eyes and a lengthening of his face. “Brax and Romana. They survived.”

“Oh Doctor,” he breathed out with a single shake of his head and a smile on his face. There was genuine thrill and happiness inside his eyes. “They did so much more than just survive.” He looked to the corner, where Rose was still on the phone. “And Rose. Our hearts.” He looked back to him. “You’d be so damned proud of her. She’s magnificent.”

“Didn’t need you to tell me that,” he answered with a goofy smile. “I already knew that. If there’s one thing in all of my lives I am truly glad for, it’s that I met her.”

“Oh,” he agreed with a smile. “I know.”

Eight looked between the two of them with a slightly discomforted expression and posture. Like the third wheel not privy to the private joke, he let out a sigh. “Well. I didn’t think I’d ever quite see myself end up in this state.”

Ten flicked him a look. “And just what state is that?”

“Like the pair of you,” he breathed out in reply. It was clear he wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. “Hopelessly in love and not being ashamed to admit it.” He shook his head. “Next you’ll be telling me we have a pair of children, a couple of dogs, and a home in the suburbs with a picket fence.”

“It’s not a picket,” Ten replied with his eyes lifted to the awning above them. There was a smirk of teasing on his face. “More a stone design, really.”

“I _really_ hope you’re jesting,” he said worriedly.

Ten pressed his lips tightly together, hummed and lifted his brows. How much he wanted to spill the beans that in his timeline, the Eighth Doctor already had all of that – happily so – and lost it. 

Perhaps that was why he seemed so aghast and against domesticity of that nature. Subconsious at play, perhaps?

Whining in the voice of his wife captured his attention and he looked her way as she slowly made her way back to the table.

“Oh, come on, Brax. Please?” she begged into the phone. “You _have_ to let me tell him. Pleasepleasepleaseplease? Pleaaaasssseeee.” She slumped and then grunted at the answer she was given. “Fine. Be that way, then. Spoil sport. Yeah, yeah. I love you, too.” She pouted when she thrust the phone across the table toward her husband. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Why me?” he queried with a look of utter distaste toward the phone. “I thought you were talking to Romana?”

“I was,” she said with another thrust of the phone. “But then Brax woke up and wanted to tell me something. And really, would you rather get a chiding from _her_ or from _him_?”

“What do I need a chiding for?” he answered with one brow lifted and the other slammed down over his eye. He rolled his eyes in defeat when she gestured toward his two younger selves. “Fine.” He snatched the phone and held it to his ear. “Before you utter a single word, Braxiatel, it might be important for you to note that I just experienced the displeasure of two of _you_ in one timeline less than three days ago. So that said: Don’t you dare give me any admonishment at all about spending any time with another incarnation of myself, you hypocritical woprat.” His eyes widened and his indignant argument fell immediately from his countenance. “I see,” he drawled darkly. “Yes. We’re on Kucails. And, you’re sure? A single CIA operative? Narvin’s quite certain of this?” The expression in his eyes darkened as quickly as his voice had, and he turned from the table to look across the sea of people milling around the marketplace. “ _Brilliant_.”

Rose took a seat and slumped down in her seat. Her expression was one of juvenile petulance as she put her elbows on the table and cradled her chin in both hands.

“So?” Nine purred with amusement as he leaned in close. “Old Brax said he loves you?”

“Technically, he said I’m in his hearts,” she corrected with a sigh. “Close enough to it, I guess.”

“Little more than that,” Eight offered with a curious tilt of his head. “It means he sees you as family. Someone he truly cares about.” His eyes flicked to Nine and back to Rose. “Rather odd for him, really. I’m his brother, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard him say that to me.”

“I’ve heard him say it about you,” she said with a softening of ger gaze. A smile spread across her face. “Of course, it’s usually said with a _but_ that includes you being insufferable, or how you infuriate him.”

“I see,” he drawled as an unreadable emotion shifted across his eyes. It was gone quickly however and replaced with cheeky curiosity. “So. What didn’t he want you to tell me?”

She whined out pathetically and dropped her chin from her hands to lay her arms across the table in front of her with her nose on the tabletop. “I can’t say, and it’s so damn juicy, too.” Her feet ran on the floor underneath the table like a small child really _really_ wanting to do or say something. “He is so mean sometimes!”

Eight had a grin on his face as he folded his arms onto the tabletop in between the light play of her arms and leaned down with his chin on his wrists. He was as close to her as he could get and wondered what strategy he might employ to get out of her what she sorely wanted to divulge to all of them. “We won’t tell him,” he assured her softly. 

She lifted her head slowly and gasped at his proximity. Those sparkling blue eyes and small cheeky held her in place.

“You shouldn’t be expected to keep a secret from your husband, now, can you?” he pressed gently. “Come on, Rose. You can tell me.”

Well that did her in. The eyes and the husky tone of voice she saw and heard only inside her dreams for the past three and a half years; the eyes and voice she missed so desperately; they called to her in a way that shattered her heart inside her chest. Her vision blurred with a sudden wash of tears that she refused to blink free. She breathed out the first two syllables of his Gallifreyan name combined with words of love and affection spoken inside his language – words only ever shared between soul-bonded mates and very rarely spoken outside the marital bed.

The phrasing, and the manner in which they were spoken by her gave him pause. His cheeky smile fell and his breath shuddered out through parted lips as he felt a stutter inside the beats of his hearts.

Rose pulled her arms back and covered her face in her hands. More words fled past her lips, these ones full of apology for her forwardness – spoken in an almost ceremonial manner of atonement. Phrasing she’d heard from her Brother in Law spoken toward his wife on many occasions.

“You speak my language,” he stated with quiet, curious surprise. His language was by no means an easy one to learn. It would take years of study for the human tongue to be able to work its way around the trills and lilts of Gallifreyan. More years atop that to truly understand the words being spoken…

…But she couldn’t be any more than twenty? 

“How?” he asked her gently.

“I taught her,” Ten interrupted harshly. He looked toward his wife with an expression of apology and urgency. “Rose, we’ve got to go.”

She wiped at her eyes with the hem of her sleeves. “But we haven’t gotten breakfast yet?”

“I’ll do a run to the bakery back in London,” he promised her. “But right now, we’ve got to leave.”

Nine sat up straight in his chair. “What’s goin’ on?”

“Nothing that concerns you,” he answered sharply. “They’re not after you.”

“Who?”

“The CIA,” he answered him with a huff. He looked to Rose and held out his hand. “Narvin sent warning through Brax. We’ve been tracked, and an agent is on route.” He exhaled. “Come on, we should get home.”

Eight narrowed his eyes and quickly drew to a stand. “Why are the CIA after you?”

Nine expanded on that. “And _how_? The CIA doesn’t even exist anymore.”

Rose ignored both men and quickly stood up. “But Doctor,” she asked worriedly. “If they’ve managed to track us here, then we can’t go home. They’ll find us there, as well.” Her hands flew to her mouth. “The children. Doctor, what if…?”

“Mark and Aly are safe. Brax and Romana are on their way back in London and will have them protected until we get back.” He gently laid his hands on her shoulders and looked into her fearful eyes. “All of the capsules at home are shielding, and Narvin’s providing additional interference from Gallifrey.” He exhaled. “He just didn’t get back to the Capitol in time to shield the TARDIS from the scanners.” He looked up and into the crowd. “I should have known they’d track us via the old girl’s systems.”

“And having three of them here right now does put off quite a powerful signature,” Eight offered with a low growl. “Having _three_ of us here gives of a much more vivid signature.”

Nine was a mixture of confused, angry, and stunned. “I have far too many questions,” he muttered. “But right now, you need to leave. I’m sure the two of us can send the …” he paused. “Just which type of agent is on your trail?”

“Assassin,” Ten said darkly. “Rassilon wants to get his hands on Rose and needs to get through me and Brax to do that. The easiest way of doing that, is by a kill-order.”

“Yeah, right,” Nine answered on a drawl. “You two aren’t going anywhere until I get the answers to about two dozen questions I have for you.”

“Really?” Ten asked him incredulously. “The need to sate your curiosity outweighs the safety of our wife?”

“No,” he growled. “The need to make sure _my_ _wife_ is safe and that this assassin is neutralised so he or she can’t go after you again outweighs everything else – including your current need to scarper like a tafelshrew.” He exhaled hard. “And if I heard you correctly, we have two children that need to be protected as well. Knowin’ _that_ , if I am not absolutely assured that this assassin is erased from the timestream I’ll be following you home in my TARDIS to meet ‘em at the door myself.”

“And I’ll be right behind him,” Eight assured firmly. His eyes were on Rose, who stood surprisingly tall despite the situation. He caught her gaze and offered her a tender smile. 

Before he could speak, however, a loud rumbling sound thundered in from the centre of the marketplace. He spun in place to look toward one of the ships that was parked in the centre of the court, and the thick throng of leather-wearing aliens that were filing down along a ramp. 

“Calgeil?” Nine muttered with surprise speckled with disgust. “Oh don’t tell me the Calgeil are the new CIA. They are the filthiest, most ruthless brutes on the whole Thinute constellation. Criminals.”

“The CIA aren’t really all that much better,” Eight growled. “Makes sense.”

“No,” the Tenth Doctor huffed out. “I can confirm beyond all reasonable doubt that the CIA would never ally with the Calgeil. The CIA is – and always will be – Gallifreyan.” He swallowed thickly. “This looks to be unrelated to the warning I received.”

“Fantastic,” Nine drawled slowly. “What do you think they’re here for?”

The front runners of the grouping each held a large firearm in each hand. They lifted their weapons high in the air and called out a warning about a full market take down by order of the Calgeil people, and that everyone was to surrender, immediately. To punctuate their order, they fired their weapons into the sky. 

“Guess that answers your question,” Rose muttered with a moan. She looked up to Ten. Despite the tone she used, there was a small smile on her lips. “Never just a small thing with you, is it?”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	33. howling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three Doctors and a ship of bad guys ... fun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got upset earlier. I had this chapter written, and for once was actually happy with what I'd written (which generally means no one else will like it), and what happened? Rogers happened, didn't they? Internet crashed, wifi gone, my cellphone data was shoddy at best.
> 
> I was panicked that I'd miss today as a result.
> 
> Thankfully, it's back up and running now after a two and a half-hour outage. 
> 
> Imagine having no TV, no internet, and a teenager bored out of his mind. Terrifying!
> 
> Anyway, I do hope that you enjoy this chapter. I really do!

~~oooOOOooo~~

The only people who didn’t drop to the ground at the sounds of weapon fire were the three Time Lords and their tiny little pink and yellow human. With people dropping to their knees and hips onto the tarmac and gravel floor of the courtyard and patio around them, the three Doctors loomed as tall and commanding beings. They may as well have been in full ceremonial robes for the power they projected.

Nine’s arms were folded tightly across his chest and his shoulders were held back to push his chest forward. He didn’t look away from the group across the way as he snarled underneath his breath and set his face in a scowl. “Ship powers all their weapons, yeah?”

“Haven’t been any upgrades to their systems as far as I know,” Ten answered as he flicked open his long jacket and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets. His head lowered to send a glower across the distance. “Their laser shots are calibrated specific to the species in order to inflict as lethal a shot as possible, that information has to be processed through the ship’s weaponry regulators.”

Nine sent a quick glare toward his elder self. “Thanks for that invaluable information, Captain Obvious. Knew that, already, thanks. Got anything new to add that might actually help?”

“How about that they’ve added regeneration inhibitors to their arsenal,” he snapped in reply with a glare toward him. He looked back to the throng that had yet to notice them. “So up against that lot, we’re out of luck if we get hit – just like anyone else they target.”

“Right,” he drawled long. “That actually helps.”

Rose peeped at their rear. When the three Time Lords had moved in together to analyse the situation, they’d effectively created a shield of protection around her. She couldn’t see over their shoulders and had to make do with peeking through the very tiny gaps between jackets at the scene. “Just how does that help?” she queried. “Knowing you’ll die if you get hit?”

“Means I won’t get in the way,” Eight offered with a look over his shoulder toward her. “Will make more of an effort not to get shot at.”

“Would think you’d do that anyway,” she groused. She looked up to him with concern in her gaze. “I don’t know the circumstances of your regeneration, but his…” She gestured toward Nine with a short flick of her eyes. “I know how he regenerated – I was there for it.”

“This isn’t where it happened,” Nine confirmed darkly. “He’s a long way from regenerating yet, Rose.” He huffed out and lowered his head to glare through his brows ahead of them. “Thinkin’ this might be a better way to go about it than what actually happened.”

“Better than how I ended up in _this_ body to begin with,” Eight said with a sigh. “Really, quite a pointless reason.”

Rose sniffed. “Well I don’t want any of you regeneratin’,” she said with order in her voice. “Or dyin’. You hear me?”

“Rose is right,” Eight offered flatly. He gestured to Nine and then himself. “Either of the two of us regenerating here and how – or dying - will do damage to the timelines.”

“Neither of which can be affected in any way,” Ten agreed with a firm nod of his head. “It’s imperative your timelines stay intact. Your regenerations and their timing can’t be deviated from. They’re vital to the timeline and the proper turn of the universe.” He lowered his head and cleared his throat with a light cough. “Looks like this one is on me, then.”

Rose grabbed at the shoulder of his jacket and tugged hard to force him to turn toward her. His reluctance to do so gave him a slight stagger that dipped his shoulder low enough to being his face level with hers.

“Rose,” he warned gently.

“No, Doctor,” she snarled as she grabbed firmly at one of his lapels to hold him down at her level. “This is _not_ on you. Me not wanting you to die or regenerate has nothing to do with timelines. I couldn’t give a shit about the damn timelines.” She paused only to swallow. “I care about _you_ , and who you are right now.” Her expression shifted from anger to pleading. “We’ve only just started with _this_ you, Doctor. We’ve still got so much more to do together.” She cupped his cheeks in her hands. “Don’t take this away from me; this face. The face I love. The face I want to wake up to every morning.”

He stepped closer to her, his hands settling on her waist. “Rose,” he breathed out longingly. “You have no idea how much I’ve needed to hear you say that.” He pressed a light kiss to her mouth, then drew his lips up to kiss at her forehead. “My hearts beat for you,” he vowed on a breath.

She repeated the sentiment in his language and lifted her head to look up at him. “So, don’t do what I know you’re thinking, okay? This isn’t your fight. Let the locals deal with it for once.”

“It’s _always_ my fight,” he corrected her with a sigh. He looked to Eight with an expression of pain and pleading. “Protect her. At all costs, protect her. Rose is your priority above all else.”

“Understood,” he confirmed with a nod of his head. He put an arm around Rose’s shoulder with a firm hold, fully expecting her to struggle against him. “Do what you have to. I’ve got her.”

“Don’t you dare,” she seethed when Ten took a long stride backward. As expected, she struggled against Eight’s hold. “Doctor, don’t you dare!”

“My hearts,” he vowed placing his hand on his chest. He then looked to Eight, his expression hardening into order. “And whatever you do, don’t let her call Brax.”

“Try an’ stop me,” she growled with a fumble in her pockets for her phone. “He’ll kick your arse, Doctor. An’ you know what? I’m gonna let him.” She pulled her phone from her pocket with clumsy movements, but wasn’t able to make it past the lock screen before it was snatched out of her hands by the Ninth version of her husband. 

“I’ll take that,” he said with a smirk.

“Give that back!”

He shook his head and dropped it into the pocket of his leather jacket. He pointed toward the man who held her so firmly and strode toward his elder self. “Rose’s got more strength to her than she looks, so hold on tight.” He thumbed toward Ten, who stood tall at the railing in analysis with one hand in his pocket, the other curled around his sonic. “I’ll see what he needs.”

“It’s alright,” he said with a grit in his teeth at her incessant struggling. “I’ve got her. I think…” He let out a small grunt when she almost broke free, but quickly took hack his hold of her. “Just settle down,” he commanded her. “I’ve got you…”

“You don’t,” she corrected him. 

“Yes I do,” he affirmed with a grunt and a curl in his lip. “So, settle down, will you?”

She let out an angry laugh. Her eyes were narrowed on her husband quietly talking with his younger self, and her frustration shattered the filter that was supposed to exist between her brain and her mouth. “Once upon a time you might’ve had me, Thete, but not anymore. Not this _you_ anyway.” She let out a hard sigh and settled her struggling for long enough to glare across at Ten in the hope it might be strong enough to drop him where he stood – alas, no luck on that. “The universe certainly saw to that, didn’t she?”

His breath caught and his hold on her tightened. “What did you just say?”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Nine spared a glance toward where Rose and his younger self waited. He noted a stunned expression on the face of the man, and the calm anger that Rose projected toward the two of them. “Well. You’re going to have to come up with something fantastic to make this up to her,” he offered with a shrug as he looked back to the scene ahead of them. “She’s livid.”

“Scared,” he corrected on a low voice. “Not angry. Scared. As I would be if I was in the same position as her.” He shifted his eyes to him. “And trust me, you’ll be there soon enough.”

“I’ll have to trust you on that,” he breathed out. He jutted his chin upward. “So, what’re you thinking this is _really_ about?”

“They’re not quite focused in this direction,” he remarked curiously. “Which means this is a little more than a simple robbery or takeover of the pavilion. They’re here for something very specific…”

“And shielding their true intentions by taking the broad spectrum approach,” Nine finished with a purse in his lips. He scanned the crowd for an answer. “Yeah, worked that out on my own, thanks.” He tunelessly whistled through pursed lips, then exhaled the remainder of his breath. “And it also means that this bunch or rowdy brutes aren’t exactly the main party.”

“That’s what I was thinking, anyway,” he agreed. He passed a glance toward his younger self. “One of us could get on board the ship, take a look at their communication logs. How are your skills in Calgeil these days?”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just ask me that.”

“That was my way of telling you that I’ll take whatever these brutes have to give you the distraction to sneak onboard and do some damage to their systems.”

“Then next time, just say that,” he answered with a huff. “Although, I think my current incarnation might be a touch more intimidating than yours is. Care to swap roles?”

He shook his head. “No. I’m the only one whose timelines allow me to either regenerate or die right now.” He looked at him. “You and Romeo over there, you’re still needed. That’s nonnegotiable.” He looked back front and swallowed thickly. “If anything happens to me. Promise me that you’ll get her back to Brax – he’ll help her.”

“Yeah,” he agreed with a drawl. “Still can’t believe he survived what he had to do.”

Ten smirked and turned his head toward him. “Doctor. _Gallifrey_ survived.” His eyes flicked to and from Rose in a gesture toward her. “And our Rose had a lot to do with it, as did Brax and Romana.” He looked back to the front. “Which is why it’s so important that you and him, you regenerate on schedule. The survival of Gallifrey depends on it.”

“Then I’ll do my best not to take an early regeneration,” Nine said almost breathlessly, a smile spreading across his cheeks. He clapped his hands together and tipped his head toward the ship. “So? Shall we, then? Get this over and done with. I have a sudden burning desire to return to London.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

_“What did you just say?”_

Rose at least had the chagrin to wince at the Doctor’s somewhat stunned reaction to her thoughtless and angry confession. She let out a small moan. “Nothing, Doctor. Forget what I said. Ignore it.”

“How can I ignore it,” he spoke against her ear. “You just told me that you and I …” He drew in a breath. “That we were lovers.”

“I’m your wife,” she said with a moan. “As in the wife of a _future_ you. Bit more than just lovers when it comes to it. But in your future nonetheless.”

He shifted his head to bring his lips close to her ear. He felt her shudder when his lips grazed at the very edge of her ear. “Then why do you react like that to my touch?”

“Be-because you’re the Doctor,” she stammered out. “My husband. I love you. Of course, I’ll react.”

His hold of her had shifted from a protective capture into the possessive embrace of a heartbroken lover holding his beloved for the last time. “It’s you, isn’t it?” he asked against her ear in a familiar and husky tone of voice. “It’s you…” 

“ _What_ am I?” she queried softly, legitimate confusion inside her voice.

“The hole in my hearts and my memory,” he answered simply with a tightening of his arms around her. “The one I can’t remember.”

“I’m not,” she corrected him with a writhe against his chest. “We haven’t even met yet.” She groaned through a curl in her lip and looked up toward Ten, who had by now walked around the railing as was on approach to the attackers. Nine was nowhere to be seen, and that worried her. “And pick your moment, Thete. Now really isn’t the time for this, yeah?”

A dip in her knees drew him down in a lean over her. Despite her efforts, he was refusing to let her go. There was growing familiarity in the shape of her against him, and of how she felt inside his arms. He moved flawlessly against her every movement as though knowing with intimate detail just how she was likely to move to fight against his hold. His mind may not remember her, but his hearts and his body certainly did…

…And, oh Sweet TARDIS of Gallifrey, did his body remember her. If the growing sense of familiarity and rising emotional response inside his chest wasn’t proof enough, the sudden release of oxytocin and the drop in serotonin inside his brain definitely confirmed it. There was a growing and instinctive primal rise within him that clutched him from tip to toes, and he knew that if he didn’t release her soon, he’d end up in full mate guarding condition. That would be dangerous to every single person here – including his elder selves.

Gods, for that condition to hit, just how _long_ had it been since he’d last held her?

He released her immediately and without warning, which had her stumble forward into a chair and then the table. Her expression was one of complete and utter surprise and confusion when she looked back at him.

“ _I’m_ the one,” he panted out with deep and staggered breaths. “The one who _married_ you, aren’t I?”

She gulped back hard, not wanting to admit that to him, but not wanting to lie to him, either. She fell back on the assurance given to her by his eldest self. “In your timeline, Doctor, we haven’t even met.”

“I don’t believe you,” he argued huskily, holding himself back against the wall.

“I don’t really care if you do or if you don’t,” she growled in reply. “My _husband_ is trying to get himself killed, so forgive me for not being fully invested in sating your particular brand of curiosity right now.”

She didn’t wait for his response before shoving a chair out of her way to make chase of Ten across the pavilion. Eight let out a long groan, a swear, then pushed himself off the wall to go after her. He caught her wrist before she made it to the opening between railing panels and pulled her back toward him.

“I already told you,” she growled at him. “We’re not doing this now.”

“No,” he agreed with a growl of his own. His eyes were full of warning as he spun her in place to pull her back up against his chest. He crossed his arm along her collarbone and pulled the both of them down into a crouch. His voice was drenched in frustration. “But I am going to do as I promised _your husband_ , and keep you protected.”

She exhaled Braxiatel’s favourite Gallifreyan swear along a breath and huffed. “You’re all as bad as each other, you know that?”

“That’s because we’re all the same man,” he answered. 

“Not even close,” she corrected him.

“Where it’s most important we are,” he huffed against her ear. His eyes shifted to the pinstriped version of himself as he approached the main group of attackers and he let out a long breath. “What is that fool up to?”

“Whatever it is, he’s not doing it alone,” she snarled out. “And if you won’t let me help, then he needs the next best thing.”

“Which is?”

She drew in a deep breath and lifted her head high. With an open purse of her lips she let out a long and urgent howl through the marketplace. She ended the howl with a trill and a broken series of huffed yelps. Another deep breath and she repeated the sound.

“Are you making the distress call of a Dahrama?” he asked against her ear. “Why would you even … and how …?” He cut himself off to hear a reply to her call in the near distance. “Oh, dear.” He looked toward his elder self and gasped in surprise to see his face held high to the sky and a vivid smile across his face. He saw the word brilliant formed in the lip movement of the man. “Oh-kay?”

There was a rapid tikka scrape of sharp claws through gravel, and Eight held onto the woman in his arms a little bit tighter. His eyes laser focused toward the sound, and the huffing pants of an animal, and within a moment a small little creature with dusty blue-white fur launched up high over the railing. His large white teeth were bared and there was a growl inside his chest. He landed with a minor stumble in front of the two of them and gave Rose a blue-eyed look before it turned tail and braced himself on the tarmac immediately in front of her. His claws dug deep into the cement and he braced himself with his shoulders hunched low and a dangerous little growl in his throat toward anyone who even dared look at them. Any movement was met with a snap of sharp teeth.

The little thing was tiny and really was quite awkward, but he certainly displayed a level of protection and aggression possessed only by much larger beasts.

“A cub?” the Doctor asked curiously against her ear. “You have a Dahrama cub?”

“His name is Neroli,” she said with a nod.

“Cute little thing. Protective, though not wholly terrifying.”

“It’s not him they should be terrified of,” Rose warned him with a lift of her head to the awning. “At least not yet, he’s just a baby.” She gestured upward. “Now those two on the other hand…” Either side of the patio two large white Gallifreyan wolves prowled silently along thick wooden beams that supported the awnings of the patio. They stalked with such incredible stealth and patience in their slowed movements that their movement would barely register in the peripheral vision of their prey. Rose smiled darkly. “It’s _them_ that they should be worried about.” 

~~oooOOOooo~~

A few moments earlier…

Ten bid a cautious farewell to his younger incarnation with a nod of his head and a roll in his shoulders. He watched as Nine disappeared quickly into the shadows of the crowd, then straightened out the seat of his jacket. He drew himself up tall and thrust one hand in to his trouser pockets. He flipped his Sonic in an upward toss in the other hand as he moved around the patio railing. He whistled out a tune that was favoured by his fourth incarnation and walked with nonchalance around the crouching and terrified people scattered throughout the pavilion.

“Well, what have we here, then?” he asked himself in a voice meant to be heard by others. “A new ritual of shopping I don’t know about yet?”

He was met with the muzzle of a large gun against the centre of his chest, and quickly stopped his walk. He lifted his eyes, holding one brow high on his forehead and looked into the threatening face of a Calgeil thug. “Well hello there,” he chirped with a wide smile. He used the point of his sonic to move the weapon away from his chest. “Is there a problem?”

“We’re here to take over the market,” the Calgeil snarled. He pointed his finger toward the ground. “We want everyone to get down on their knees and surrender.”

“Oh,” he breathed out without expressing the level of fear that the gunman was expecting. “Well that’s going to make for a long day, isn’t it?” He blew out a breath and rocked back onto his heels. In the peripheral of his vision, he could see the black shadow of movement through the crowd that belonged to his younger self. “Wouldn’t mind me, then. Just here for a quick visit with the wife. Do carry on.”

He turned just slightly as though ready to walk away and wasn’t surprised to feel the gun thrust against him again. He looked back to the gunman. “Please stop doing that, I’m finding it just a little bit on the side of very annoying.”

The gunman shoved the muzzle of the gun a little harder into his chest. “On your knees.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes. “Yes. Well. We might have a bit of a problem with that.” He rubbed at his chin. “Not one for getting on my knees, me.” He smirked and gave a small chuckle. “Well, there might be one or two occasions where it might be considered acceptable, but as my wife isn’t here right at this juncture and the rather public atmosphere of the market, it might be considered a little on the side of inappropriate…”

“I said on your knees,” the gunman repeated with a firmer yell. 

“And I said no,” the Doctor yelled back with the same force in his voice. He then exhaled a breath and softened his voice and the seat of his shoulders back toward relaxed and somewhat nonchalant. “Again, not really a penitent on my knees kind of person. Aside from the fact that I really don’t wish to dirty up my trousers – which I’ve just had dry cleaned.” He pursed his lips with faux embarrassment and rubbed at the back of his neck. “I’m afraid that in my old age, getting down on my knees causes a host of issues that’ll make the rest of my day rather unpleasant.” He exhaled a long breath. “If you think hitting the century mark is awkward in the age department, try making it to nine-hundred. Or am I over a thousand by now?” He pursed his lips in thought. “I mean I say that I’m only nine-hundred-odd, but I could be … well … I could be getting much closer to fifteen hundred by now. Tend to lose count at five hundred, really. Amiright?”

“Fifteen hundred,” the gunman repeated curiously to himself. His curiosity switched to aggression. “What species are you?”

“Well that’s a little personal, don’t you think?” he scoffed in reply with a judgmental look up and down. “I could ask you the same thing, you know.” He then grinned. “Oh. Oh! Is this like an internet chat room on Earth when they ask A/S/L? I’ll go first: Age: Somewhere near a millennium. Sex: Male. Location: Currently on Kucails, but call Gallifrey home.” He grinned, even as the eyes of the gunman widened and he took a long stride backward. “Now. _Your_ turn.”

“Time Lord,” the gunman hissed darkly. “You’re a Time Lord!”

“Well, yes,” he agreed with a nod of his head. “I am. And I’d appreciate it if you’d use a little less disdain when you call me that. I mean, how would you feel if I said Calgeil with that much hatred in my tone.” He lifted his eyes just slightly to see his younger self disappear around the top of the ramp to enter the ship. His eyes snatched back to the gunman. “Well, I’d imagine you might take offence to that, might’n you? Hmmm?”

“Commander,” the gunman called over his shoulder. “We’ve got a Time Lord here. Think he might be the one we’re looking for?”

A larger fellow than the one currently trying to get him down on his knees approached quickly from the left. There was a scowl on his face so deep and creased that it would rival any that he ever saw from one of his professors at the academy. The Doctor’s eyes shot wide and he shirked back just slightly. “Wow, you’re an angry looking one, aren’t you?”

He held a gun into the Doctor’s face. “Which one are you?” he growled in order.

“Not really one for niceties, are you?” he said with a huff. 

“What is your name?”

He exhaled. “Well. I go by many names, actually,” he said with a sigh as he looked upward in thought. His lips turned up as he spoke. “Let’s see. John Smith. Theta Sigma. The Oncoming Storm. Destroyer of Worlds.” He then lowered his eyes to the man, and tilted his head in question. “Any of those sound familiar to you?”

“We are looking for the Doctor,” he answered. “Or the other one, Braxiatel.”

The Doctor hummed thoughtfully. “I see. And why would you be looking for them?” He adopted an expression of distaste. “Not really prime examples of the Time Lord Society. Renegade filth, the both of them.” 

He smirked. “The President of Gallifrey is looking for them.”

“Since when so the Cageil work with Gallifrey?” he queried with a purse in his lips. If Rassilon was able to get the Cageil onside, then this fight they were planning against him just got a little bit more complicated. Which other world of filth had he recruited? “I was under the impression that the Cageil loathed the Time Lords.”

“We want their weapon,” the commander revealed with a grey-toothed grin. “The two Time Lords protect a weapon. Rassilon wants it – and therefore, now we do as well.”

A brow flicked on the Doctor’s forehead. Well, this idiot was less than a halfwit in revealing that much, wasn’t he? 

“And just what kind of weapon is that?” he asked carefully. Oh, he had a fair idea, but before he let fury take control of him, it might be best to confirm first. No sense in channeling Romana’s legendary incandescence if these brutes only wanted to get their hands on a basic staser. “What is Rassilon calling this weapon?”

“It is known as Bad Wolf,” he stated. 

“Bad Wolf,” the Doctor repeated inside a whisper. Well. This was a solar system of bad, wasn’t it? Now he wasn’t only expected to counter off Gallifreyan agents, but the universe’s filthy bad guys wanted in on it too? Brax was going to be _thrilled_ by this news.

“You’ve heard of this Bad Wolf?” the commander shot back urgently with a lift of his weapon into the Doctor’s face. “You’ll tell us how to find the Doctor and how to retrieve the Bad Wolf weapon.”

Brilliantly, at the same time the demand was given, a long howl sounded out across the courtyard. The Doctor looked upward intot he sky and let the howl shudder down along his spine. “Brilliant,” he said with a laugh in the back of his throat. He lowered his head toward where he knew his wife was seated and mentally thanked her for being so damn magnificent as to bring in their two big white fluffy kids to help out.

How perfect that they were wolves, as well. Bonus points for that.

He knew the wolves wouldn’t be too far away and looked back to the commander with a smile across his cheeks. He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and kicked at the gravel beneath his feet. “Bad Wolf? Yep. Heard of her.” He blew out an impressed breath. “Beautiful to behold.. Stunning, in fact.” He lowered his head to look at the ground. “She takes my breath away every second of every day.”

“Where can I find it?” he asked urgently.

The Doctor’s eyes lifted, but his head did not. He stared at the man ahead of him with a dark expression through his brows. ‘You won’t,” he snarled with a level of darkness not even he knew he was capable of. “Not you. Not Rassilon. And not anyone else in this damn universe that think they want to get their hands on her.” He drew in a breath that lifted one side of his lip into a curl. “I won’t allow it.”

“You’re one of them,” the Commander growled. “The Doctor or Braxiatel.”

“I am,” he said with a purr and a smile. “The Doctor – to be specific.” He held his breath to hold that dangerous look a moment. Then, with a sharp inhale, dropped the fearsome façade and lifted his head with a smile. “So. Hello!” He heard a multitude of high-powered weapons click hard into firing position and gave a slight nod of his head. “Ahhh. Yes. Straight to it, then.”

“You will give us the weapon,” the Commander demanded harshly. “Or we will kill everyone in this market.”

“You _could_ ,” he suggested with a shrug. “Or you could realise that you’ve made a very, very big mistake, and get back on your ship to skulk about the universe in your very pointless criminal way.” He exhaled and shook his head. His nose screwed up just slightly. “Because, really. I don’t like to share my things. I really, _really_ , don’t like sharing.”

“We don’t intend on _sharing_ ,” the commander growled. “We plan to take it from you.” He held his gun on a terrified lavender-skinned woman cowering against the landing gear of another ship. “I’ll kill them all, one by one, starting with this one.”

The Doctor lowered his head and let out a long huff. “I really wish you hadn’t said that,” he said quietly. He drew in a breath and lifted his head. At the top of the ramp he could see the figure of his Ninth self lurking in the shadows. “Although that does make this a little easier, I suppose.”

“And what’s that?”

He let out a shrill whistle that was loud enough to echo off the hulls of the parked ships. “You want a bad wolf,” he asked. “How about two of them? Soliarn! Tiallu! Now!”

A pair of deadly growls sounded out above all of them. The Calgeil group looked up with horror at the shadows of two giant animals leapt from what looked like the rooftop of the café across the other side of the pavilion. All the Commander could see was the glint off white fangs and luminescent blue eyes shining through the shadow.

“Fire!” he called out with panic. “Kill them!”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	34. Clever Boys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Madness with the Calgeil continues. Eight has a truly bad sense of timing. The Doctor(s) make(s) a discovery that will very likely upset old Narvin, and will definitely piss off Brax.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was relentlessly harrassed today. RELENTLESSLY harrassed. And over the past hour of writing harrassed even more to finish up.
> 
> So that said: This may be jumpy. I don't have time at all for a reread.... (then again, since when do I?)
> 
> Short on time, so a short chappy. Sorry about that. 
> 
> I sincerely hope you enjoy...

~~oooOOOooo~~

The Eighth Doctor had his head held high and his eyes wide as he watched the two gigantic wolves launch in perfect synch from the beams at his elder self’s command. He imagined the sight must be terrifying from where the Calgeils were standing, but from this vantage point, it was a spectacular view. Judging by the sigh and whimper from the woman in his arms, Rose had the same sense of awe flowing within her.

“They’re beautiful,” he offered in a whisper against her ear, then flinched when the wolves hit ground and began their attack. “Well…” He closed his eyes with a wince and turned his head enough that his nose was in Rose’s hair. “Oh.”

“The most beautiful things in the universe are often the most dangerous,” she offered. “And the kids are definitely beautiful.”

“As are you,” he breathed softly against her hair. “Does that mean you’re dangerous as well?”

“D-Doctor,” she warned with a light stammer as the puffs of his breaths against her neck drew a shudder down along her spine. “Don’t do this. Not now.” It was tempting to turn her head toward his, to further enhance the light connection they had right now, but she held herself from doing it. She made to with turning herself just slightly to face him a little more comfortably. She sat sideways to him now and used the press of her hand against the centre of his chest to lever herself away from him. “We should do something to help.”

“Keeping you safe is help enough,” he offered with slight disappointment in his tone. “My elder self expects me to keep you out of that. That is my role today.”

She looked down at the cement at her knees and let out the smallest of chuckles at that. “Oh, _Doctor_.”

“Yes, Darling?”

She lifted her eyes to his ignoring the shudder that his endearment rippled down her spine. “The man who married me knows me far better than that.” She shuffled backward on her hands and knees. “Which is why _he_ felt it very necessary to assign to me someone he thought might be able to stop me.” She smirked. “Unfortunately, he chose someone who doesn’t know me at all.” She looked to the pup and quickly launched to her feet. “Neroli, come!”

His eyes flashed with growing frustration and anger to see her run with a small white cub snapping close at her ankles. He let out a low curse as he rocked forward onto his knees to launch off after her. “Rose!” He growled out with order. “Get back here!”

~~oooOOOooo~~

As magnificent as he knew the sight must be, Ten didn’t bother looking upward at his two wolves launching in attack. The shadows that moved quickly across the tarmac was image enough for him. He bolted forward, curling around a terrified Calgeil soldier with a strike of shoulder against shoulder. He barely stumbled at the awkward strike, but did have to straighten himself out to leap over a cowering Kucails native on his way to the ramp. 

“Tell me you disabled the weapons,” he yelled toward Nine as he ran heavily up the ramp. “Because if anything happens to those wolves, Rose’ll kill all of us.”

“Question number fourty-three,” Nine said with a low growl from beside a metal support pole. “And, yeah. ‘Course I did. Their weapons are just pretty little light shows for now.”

“Good,” he replied through his teeth. He grabbed at the shoulder of Nine’s jacket without stopping his run to pull him after him. “We’re not done yet.”

Nine didn’t have the dignity of remaining completely on balance. He stumbled to almost a complete fall under the tug of Ten. He managed to shrug himself free and ran forward in a very awkward forward lean with his arms flailing awkwardly to the side as he struggled to remain on his feet. “You’re leaving that lot to _them_?”

“Dahrama,” Ten reminded him sharply. “Protecting one of their pack. They don’t need Time Lord assistance, trust me on that. We’re safer staying out of it.” 

“You sure they’re capable of filtering out the bad guys and won’t take out the innocents?” he grit out as he finally found his balance to run with a little more dignity at his elder self’s side. “We don’t need collateral damage here, Doctor.”

“They’re smart,” he answered with a slow in his run as they approached the main control room. “They’ll only attack if someone attacks them. And if an innocent is stupid enough to take on a Dahrama that is obviously there to help, then there’s really not much I could have done to stop them anyway.”

“In case you’ve forgotten the general nature of people, Doctor, they do tend to act like idiots when they’re frightened.”

He grunted with frustration as he approached the main communications console. “Fine then.” He thrust his arm toward the door. “If it’s such a concern to you, then off you go. Bring yourself face to face with an irate Gallifreyan wolf.” His fingers flew quickly over a wide 150-key keyboard filled with the symbols and commands of an alien planet. “Right now, I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

Nine folded his arms across his chest and drew himself tall as he let his eyes quickly scan through the glyphs of the Calgeil. “Such as?”

“Rassilon,” he answered shortly.

“Wouldn’t waste your time worrying about that fool,” he said with a huff. “Double his brain size and he’d still be less than a halfwit. You’d think council might have found a better vessel than Valerian to resurrect him.”

“Had little choice in the matter,” Ten said with a shrug in his shoulders. “They needed a direct descendant. Someone who could be elevated to President and would be willing to sacrifice themselves for the honour.”

“Memory serves, Valerian wasn’t all that willing.” He took a step forward and released the fold of his arms. He pressed his hands into the edge of the console to support himself in a curious lean forward. “What’s going on with the old idiot that’s got you all in a huff, anyway?”

Ten exhaled as he continued to race his fingers across the keyboard to pull up as much information as he could. Shame that the bulk of what he was finding was completely irrelevant. “The Calgeil Commander. He has a little too much knowledge about something he shouldn’t. I need to know how he got that information – and just how many of the other nefarious species across the universe know the same.”

“That information being?”

Ten exhaled hard as his fingers stilled on the keyboard. Purposeful tapping became mere light finger touches on the keys. “Bad Wolf,” he said quietly after a moment. “They’re looking for the Bad Wolf.”

“I see,” he drawled slowly in reply. He deepened his lean over the console. “So we figured out what this Bad Wolf thing was, then?”

“Not a what,” Ten answered on a whisper. “But a who.” He sniffed and shook himself. “And the identity of Bad Wolf really isn’t your concern right now. So, let’s just leave it at that for now, yeah?”

“Well, then what’s so special about this Bad Wolf, then?” he asked with a shrug and a tightening of his gaze on the information now paused on the monitor ahead of them. “And how does it involve us and Brax?”

Ten shifted his head to the side to look at Nine with a pinched expression of question. “How did you know…?”

Nine jutted his chin upward in a gesture toward the screen. “CIA Directive from the Presidential office. Looks like we’re under a kill order. This is approval for them to use the Regeneration inhibitors on their firearms.” His head jerked back just slightly. “Well. I know we’ve always upset council a little here and there, and they’ve put a forced regeneration on us – but to take them away completely.” He looked to him. “What did we do?” His brows lifted. “Or more importantly, what did Brax do that we managed to get the blame for?” 

“You’re a clever boy, apparently,” Ten huffed out. “You’ve already gotten all the clues, time to work it out for yourself.”

Nine looked off to one side in thought. His mind ticked back to the plaza, the table, the phone call, and his eyes flashed wide with realisation. He shot an almost panicked look toward his elder self. “Bad Wolf is _Rose_?”

“Yeah,” he drawled out along a slow breath. “She is.” He swallowed with a wince. “And now, Rassilon wants her.”

“Those words,” he said with a worried sigh. “They’ve followed us like it’s a dire warning across the universe.” He looked toward Ten. “Just what is it about her that has Rassilon so damn excited to take her from us?”

“It’s not something that matters in your timeline,” he answered. “Right now, with you, Rose is just Rose: the wonderful human girl who saved our lives and stole our hearts. That’s all you need to know.”

“No,” he growled with threat. “That’s _not_ all I need to know.”

“It is,” he corrected sharply with a lift of his eyes. He exhaled hard to push that answer a little harder, then shifted his eyes back to the monitor. “It’s all you need to know.”

He exhaled a growl. “Don’t you tell me that – “

Ten held up a finger to ask a moment, and then let it drop back to the keyboard. With swift keystrokes he quickly pulled up another window to fill a second screen. “We have a bigger concern right now.”

He moved a stride closer to stand at Ten’s side. He looked up at the monitor and flicked his eyes between both screens. “Oh. That’s not good.”

Ten shook his head slowly. “Narvin is going to have a conniption over this.” He went back to the keyboard and more furiously sped across the keyboard. “And he’s going to want to know just how this communication was intercepted from Gallifrey. No one is supposed to be able to hack into the CIA systems. The security protocols were designed by Braxiatel. No one can hack through his security – not even us.”

“Yeah, Brax operates at a gear higher in ruthless stealth and covert untrustworthiness than the rest of the CIA,” he admitted with a sniff. “Would’ve been a perfect operative for them.”

He snorted with a shake in his head as he continued on the keyboard. “None of them trust him enough to give him that level of covert power.”

“So they gave him Council powers instead.” He gave a light shove of his shoulder against his elder self and took over on the keyboard. “Let me hook in the TARDIS to this system to keep an eye on it. See if they’re sharing the information – or at least what their source is. Codes should still be running in yours, so I trust you to make sure Narvin’s well aware of the breach so he can close it up.” He sniffed and smirked. “After he’s had his signature meltdown of course.”

“Meanwhile,” Ten muttered with a wipe of his hands on the lapels of his jacket. “Let me find a way to mess about with their flight systems a little. Navigation error in their autopilot, perhaps. Send them to Skaro.” He smirked. “Perfect holiday destination for them, don’t you think?”

“Straight to Gallifrey, _I_ would suggest,” Nine offered instead. “Land them on top of the CIA tower. With a big neon sign on the hull: Here you go, Narvin! Did the job for your Chronic Incompetency Agency as usual. You’re welcome.” He sniffed. “And P.S. Tell Rassilon better luck next time.”

Ten chuckled and let his head dance just slightly with amusement as he ducked quickly underneath the console, sonic screwdriver in between his teeth. “Keep your eyes open, yeah? This might take a minute.” He ducked his head out for a brief moment. “Any chance of you hijacking the communications to have the TARDIS looped in to anything they receive going forward?”

“Already done, though it might make for pretty boring evening reading for you,” he said with a shrug. “Not a single Pornhub or single ladies that love you long time email message in this mess.”

“Really?” he scoffed incredulously from underneath the console.

He rolled his eyes at himself. “Sorry. Linked into Mickey’s laptop the other day to send him a birthday message from Rose. Hit a slight detour in the programming and accidentally ended up in a section of that hard drive I never hope to see again. Still recovering.”

There was a light chuckle from below. “Good ol’ Mickey.”

“Guess, yeah.” He folded his arms across his chest. “You know, we could do an auto forward of these systems to the Shadow Proclamation. This is right up their alley, and saves you having to wade through it.”

“Nah,” he drawled as he slipped back underneath the console. “This is a Gallifreyan matter. More specifically, the CIA. The Shadow Proclamation wouldn’t go near CIA activities.” He blew out a breath and after the buzz of his sonic, pushed himself out from underneath the console. He waggled his brows and smirked a cheeky smile. “It also involves _us_.”

Nine held his hand down to help his elder self back up to his feet. He spoke through his teeth as he took his weight and lifted. “Good point.”

On his feet, and smirking like a Cheshire cat, Ten gave him a tilt of the head instead of a cheeky wink. “Looks like their final destination is Shada, with a brief detour through the Capitol. I’ll have Brax send a message to Narvin to give him a heads up. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the armed guard of honour the Chancellery Guard usually put on for us when we materialise on Gallifrey.”

“Meanwhile,” Nine said with a light and very facetious bow and a sweep of his arm in the air toward the room. “Shall we head on out and see just what level of carnage your murder dogs have left behind?”

~~oooOOOooo~~

The cub at her ankles should have granted her a hindrance, but Rose Tyler flawlessly navigated her way around the patio railing, fallen chairs, cowering bodies, and random bits of debris left behind by fleeing market-goers. The Doctor did his best to make chase, but unfortunately he didn’t have the same nimble stride as the woman he was pursuing. He grit his teeth and focused as much on his path that he could whilst maintaining a watchful eye on Rose.

“For the sake of Rassilon, Rose, will you get back here where I can protect you?”

Rose did a balletic pirouette twirl to evade a blue-skinned, three-armed man, and broke out of the spin quickly to rush toward where one of the wolves had it’s jaws around the wrist of a man still able to hold a large weapon in the captured hand. He fired round after round in an uncoordinated blast that she dodged and weaved from. “Tiallu!” she called out hurriedly as she twisted and turned from the beam. “Where’s the Doctor? Where’d he go?”

The gunman fired off another round that Rose realised far too late that she was unable to duck from, but as she stumbled into a fall and waited for the painful strike, she felt a set of powerful arms come around her. “I’ve got you,” he growled as he spun them both to put his back in the way of the lazer. 

“Doctor, No!” she cried out as the blast struck home. “You can’t!” She ended her words with a scream of panic that he’d been hit. 

She expected him to cry out with the pain of the blast. She expected the two of them to be thrown violently forward with the power of the hit, but to her surprise, he simply made a sound of surprised curiosity.

“Well, that is interesting, isn’t it?” He murmured curiously. He looked down into an absolutely terrified pair of brown eyes with a smile. “That didn’t hurt at all. I guess one of me managed to neutralise the weapons while they weren’t looking. How very clever of me.”

She panted in his hold. That smile, and the twinkle in his blue eyes that would normally have had her fall into a puddle of swoon and happiness on the ground only served to aggrieve her at this moment. Her expression hardened and she slapped hard at his shoulder. “You unbelievably stupid, infuriating, reckless man!”

“Now, Rose…”

“Let go of me!” she ordered him sharply with a shove of both her hands into his shoulders. She let out a grunt of frustration when he refused. “Let me go!” she demanded again. “I have to find him!”

“I’m getting you out of here,” he growled in reply as he rocked his shoulders far enough backward to lift her feet an inch off the floor. “To the TARDIS with you, come on.”

“I am not a child,” she seethed into his face. “I don’t even treat my own like this.”

“And which one of me fathered them?” he asked boldly. “Was it me?”

Resigned to be restrained, she slumped to give him the heaviest possible weight of her. Something her daughter taught her during one of her many anti-bath tantrums. “You know, for a Time Lord, you have the worst possible timing.” She sniffed and glared into his face. “In case you’ve missed it, Doctor, there’s mayhem and carnage all around us, my _husband_ is missing…”

“Your _husband_ is right here,” he corrected her.

“…and all you seem to be concerned with is the competition of which one of you got to me first.”

That was exactly as crass and deplorable as he thought it was to hear, and he winced at the notion that she believed that his concern was borne of competition and nothing else. Oh, she couldn’t be more mistaken about that. He opened his mouth to chide her for that belief, but only managed out a yelp at the firm grip of a small wolf’s jaw around his ankle. Immediately he released the woman in his arms and staggered backward for freedom from the cub. The little thing let go of his ankle and yapped up angrily at him. “What in the name of…? Get away from me!”

“Good boy, Neroli,” Rose said with a cheer as she immediately broke into a run. “Gonna give you all the treats when we get back home, little one. Now, let’s find your granddad, yeah?” Her eyes shifted with tight focus as she searched for any sign of brown pinstripes in amongst the thinning crowd of people. She barely even registered that the only people still even remaining in the courtyard were the black-suited bad guys that were currently being herded by a stalking pair of Gallifreyan wolves into a tight pack of leather wrapped luncheon meat ready for packaging. Her entire focus was on finding the Doctor and making sure he was safe and still in one piece. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out to him.

With each call of his name, her heart fell lower inside her chest. She felt her eyes water and her heart ache with each second that ticked by without him. She could feel the presence of the man who had made her his wife behind her, and although he had abandoned any effort to try and restrain her – for her own safety – he was keeping pace close enough behind her that he could rush in as her protector if necessary.

“Doctor!” she called out with a shaking breath. “Please, Doctor. Where are you?”

He finally appeared at the top of the ramp that led into the Calgeil ship. His head dipped to dodge the low doorway and he looked to her with surprise on his face. “Rose?”

Nothing else in the universe mattered to her in that moment but to get to him. She hiccupped with thankfulness and broke into a run toward him. It was only very slightly surprising to her that he started to jog, and then run toward her. Tears of relief blurred her vision, and she gulped in air to suppress the happy sob that wanted freedom from her throat.

She didn’t even make it to the bottom of the ramp before their romantic lovers-run toward each other was thwarted by the curse of the universe that seemed intent on haunting them both. She felt a sudden and painful snap of an arm around her throat and let out a strangled yelp as she was pulled into the chest of a man much shorter, but obviously much stronger than her.

“Stand back, Time Lords,” the Calgeil commander warned the Doctors that stood either side of him. He waved a weapon familiar to the both of them. It wasn’t a Calgil firearm, this was clearly a CIA-issued staser and was more than capable of dropping them exactly where they stood. “The weapon is mine, and you will step back in surrender and let my men go, or I’ll kill you both.”

Rose’s eyes were wide with horror and she clutched at the forearm that was across her throat with both hands. She looked with desperation toward Ten. “Doctor?” she pleaded with fear.

“It’s okay,” he assured her. “Rose, it’s okay. It’ll be okay, I promise you.” Both his hands were held up in surrender and he walked sideways down the remainder of the ramp to stand beside his younger self. He grit his teeth and seethed through them. “You were supposed to keep her safe.”

“Which is a task much more easily said than done,” he seethed in reply. “She’s bullheaded, that one.”

“You have no idea,” he agreed with a huff. He lifted his chin to the man who held his wife. “Let her go, Commander,” he warned. “This is the only warning I’ll give you on that.”

“And what do you plan to do about it?” he laughed in reply. “Send in more of your attack dogs?” He sniffed and thrust the staser underneath Rose’s chin. “Do that, and I’ll kill her.”

Rose panted with terror in his hold. The warm, flat, rectangle of the weapon’s muzzle dug sharply into haw jaw and she winced at the sting of it. She could feel the slick filth of the Commander’s uniform pressed up against her thin cotton shirt, each sharp button and zipper pull. Certainly not the last sensations she wanted to feel before she was stasered to death.

“And then what?” she heard her husband growl out. “Kill _her_ , and what good will that do you? You can’t taunt Rassilon and the Lords of Time if the weapon they’re hunting for is dead and completely neutralised, can you? No riches for you in that, is there?”

Rose felt a shudder down her spine at the Doctor’s words. The implications were utterly terrifying, abducted by filthy criminals and then sent to Rassilon to become his little experiment? Her breath hitched into a pant and her eyes flashed open wide to look down at him. She knew he had to have a plan in mind or he wouldn’t be so calmly taunting from several feet away from her. That didn’t provide her an immense amount of comfort, however, not when this man held a weapon on him that she knew could provide a lethal shot to any Time Lord.

“Let them go,” she said softly, her eyes locked on her pinstriped Time Lord at the base of the ramp. “I’ll come with you.”

“You’re coming anyway,” he said with a laugh against her ear. “This isn’t a matter of choice for you.”

Her vision shimmered into a tunnel of brilliant amber and she felt her muscles energize and buzz as she turned her face toward her shoulder to address the man standing behind her. Her amber-rimmed eyes remained on Ten, and her mind called on his strength and will to keep her grounded and brave in the face of this. That bravery was hard to find to see the drop-jawed look of question and horror on the face of the youngest of the Doctors. Her own Doctor looked at her with a firm expression and a nod in his head. Slowly his hand rose to touch in between his hearts.

“This isn’t’ about my choice,” she said finally to the man with darkness and danger in her quiet voice. “It’s about yours. And I’m givin’ you that choice right now.”

“I really don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation you are in right now, young lady.”

“No,” she corrected as she turned to him fully and let him see the swirl of the vortex in her eyes. “I don’t think you understand.” To the rear of the man, she could see the dark and looming figure of the Ninth Doctor making a stealthy approach. There was no expression that she could see, but she heard the hitch in his breath that gave her a fair idea of his reaction to her. She exhaled as she looked back into the eyes of the Commander. “Brax calls me a ticking time bomb. Uncontrollable and ready to blow at any minute. So, tick. Tick. Tick.”

There was a bellow of the Time Lord’s name from the base of the ramp, an order from the man in pinstripes for the one in leather to act. In a blinding move of speed, Nine had pulled Rose free of the Commander, and had relieved him of his weapon. He held his arm around Rose’s waist and the gun up in aim toward her attacker.

“Thing about Time Lords,” he began with a sniff and a roll in his shoulder. “Is that we’re a sneaky, tricky bunch. Even when you think you have one contained; you have to make sure you’ve got an eye out at all times.” He gave a hard kiss at Rose’s temple. “And never, _ever_ , try to go after the mate of one. We tend to multiply into packs when that happens.”

“That’s really bad,” Rose huffed out with secondhand embarrassment reddening her cheeks. “Like, awkwardly so.”

“Might be,” he admitted with a shrug as he put the staser into his jacket pocket and picked her up in his arms and carried her to the edge of the ramp. “Oi, Doctor. Catch!”

Her eyes flashed wide with horror to feel him dip his knees in preparation to toss her down more than a whole storey to the ground. “No! Doctor, don’t!”

“Oh, he’s got you,” he assured her with a wink. “And I’ve got to finish up with this idiot. See you shortly, love.”

He lifted his arms to toss her upward, then pushed out to make sure she cleared the edge of the ramp. She let out a short and panicked yelp as she felt the release of his arms and fell through the air to the hard ground below. It was a short fall, but it felt an eternity before her back and legs fell perfectly into the cradle of velvet and silk that were the arms of the Eighth Doctor. He stumbled only lightly at the impact and let out the smallest of grunts as he gripped tightly to protect her from the sharpness of his knee as he contracted underneath her.

“I’ve got you,” he said through his teeth as he caught his strength and slowly rose back up to full height. He released her enough to let her feet touch the floor and cupped at the side of her face to check that she was unhurt.

“You. You caught me,” she breathed out with relief.

“Of course I did,” he said in a breathy voice of incredulity that she’d believe he wouldn’t. “I will _always_ catch you.”

“A-And if you can’t?” she ventured over a quickly drying tongue. 

“Then I’ll fall with you,” he vowed firmly as he closed the distance between them, let his eyes flutter closed and pressed his lips to hers.

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~


	35. Remembering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath of the Calgeil affair...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This is nothing but shameless, self indulgent fluff worthy of the worst of trash novels (without the smut. no smut.)
> 
> Really, this is all just lovey-lovey smoochie-woochie stuff that will rot your teeth. If that's your thing, groovy. If not, then you may want to skip it.
> 
> Although there is one bit in there that was specifically requested by one of our readers (maybe a couple of you, come to think of it), involving Nine laying down a bit the law on Ten. Actually, he punches him... Hard to find a bit for it, but I managed it. :)
> 
> Anyhooo. Make sure you book a dental appointment for when you finish this... You'll need it. I hope you enjoy.

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~

Roses eyes were wide and focused on the arc of dark lashes that bordered his closed eyes as his lips touched to hers. She inhaled her breath as a hitch through her nose when she felt him press his lips against hers. As always, when he initiated a kiss with her in this body, it was soft and barely perceptible. It was a request for permission to deepen their connection, a touch with a light parting of his lips that closed gently on hers.

With the remembrance of his touch she parted her lips with a gasp and a whimper of longing. He quickly accepted that as his permission and lightly tilted his head to press the length of his nose against hers and guided the roll of their jaws into perfect synchronicity as he deepened their connection. His hand remained gently cupped around her cheek, his fingertips grazing lightly at her temple. His other arm tightened around her back to pull her closer to him.

With the press of her breasts against his chest and the tingle of his mind seeking entry into her own though the touch of his fingers against her temple, Rose drew in a deep breath of him and pulled herself back. Her breaths drew in and out in hurried gasps of worry and, for perhaps the twentieth time today, she shifted to release herself from his hold.

“Doctor,” she whimpered urgently. She held one hand around his wrist at her cheek and used the other to try and pry his arm from her back. “Don’t, please.”

He didn’t remove his hand from against her cheek, but as his eyes fluttered open to a lazy, hooded, gaze, he looked at the ring she sported on her finger. He shifted his hand then to bring both in between them. 

“The reason I couldn’t find this,” he remarked softly without looking up at her. “Was because I’d already given it to you.”

She released his wrist and curled that hand within the part of her breasts. She stepped backward as she brought her other hand around to cover the diamond from sight. “It actually hurts me to know you were even looking for it,” she admitted on a barely audible whisper.

“Why?”

She stood sideways to him now and lifted her eyes to look into his face. “Because it means your hearts were captured by another.” She inhaled deeply. “And that hurts, Doctor. Even if it wasn’t your fault, it still hurts.” She gulped and let her hands fall off to her sides. Her eyes searched out the blue-white fur of the wolves. “I should make sure they’re okay.”

“I’m quite sure the both of them are,” he ventured with a pinch in his eyes. “We really should talk…”

“Let her go,” Ten interrupted with a frustrated huff. His face was set in a frown and his arms were uncharacteristically folded across his chest with obvious annoyance. “I hate it when he’s right, you know.”

“When who’s right?”

“Braxiatel.”

“And just what is it that you feel he so on the mark with this time,” Eight gruffed.

“That we are an infuriating, frustrating little brother,” he answered. He shifted a look from Rose toward his younger self. “You just couldn’t let it go, could you? Couldn’t shelve your damn curiosity for a single moment, despite me warning to you let it go.”

“Well, perhaps if you’d been a little more upfront about the entire situation rather than only releasing a small, cryptic, and quite frankly inadequate and unreasonable demand not to mention…”

“Say that name, and I’ll put you on the ground,” Ten warned hotly with a spin toward Eight. “If you think for a fraction of a second that what we had with _her_ comes anywhere near close to what we have – had – with Rose, then you are sorely mistaken.”

“Near as I can remember,” Nine added as he jumped off the lower edge of the ramp to join them. “We felt more for Phen than we did Charley.” He stopped at Ten’s glare and held up his hands. “Hey. Caught the tail end of that, had to interject with somethin’ close to meaningful.” He stood tall with his arms across his chest and a high rise in his brows. “And I’m with silk and velvet here when he says you should’ve been a bit more up front about what’s going on. I, personally, would love to know how he even knows her. I was the one who met Rose, not him.”

“It…” Ten exhaled with a roll his in eyes and his head. “It’s complicated. About as complicated as it can get.”

“I’m a smart boy,” Nine said with a sniff. “Bet I can wrap my head around it well enough.”

“Really bet you can’t,” Ten disagreed quietly. “There are times _I_ can’t even wrap my head around it, and I’ve lived every single part of our timeline that involves Rose.” He looked to Eight. “But, yes. To sate your curiosity, _you_ were the one of us who loved that woman so damn much that you not only made her your wife but fathered two incredible children with her as well.”

“Hold on,” Nine said with a perplexed sound and shudder in his shoulders. “In my timeline, right now, I’m a father and a husband?” his eyes flashed toward Rose, who was currently in a cuddle with one of the wolves. “My Rose, she’s…?”

“ _Your_ Rose hasn’t even met him yet,” Ten offered with a slouch and a thrust of his hands into his pockets. He looked off to one side. “She met _him_ when she left _me_.”

There were two sounds of incredulity from his left, but only Nine voiced the question on both their minds. “I’m sorry, what? Rose left you?” His brows pulled together and his eyes flicked toward the wolves. “But…?”

“She did,” he confirmed on a low voice. “Broke both of my hearts and left me one very stormy night on Crandinia …” He inhaled. “But not before I’d broken hers first.” He cleared his throat and shifted his head toward the two men without actually looking at either of them. “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I need to check on … on my wife.”

Both Eight and Nine watched him walk slowly toward his wife with absolute defeat weighing down his shoulders. It was as though they could hear both of his hearts weep inside his chest.

“Are you wrapping your head around it?” Eight asked out of the side of his mouth.

“Not one part of it,” he answered on a whisper. 

“Neither am I,” he admitted. “And I’m not leaving here until I know exactly what happened, why I’m not still with her, and worse: Why I can’t remember the one who became the most important person in my entire life.”

“And you’ve no doubt about that, do you?”

“Look at _him_ ,” he said with a flick of his hand toward Ten, silhouetted in in the sunshine ahead of them. A powerful, yet defeated creature in a solitary stance in watch over his beloved. “And tell me she isn’t.”

“Don’t need to look at him,” Nine gruffed. “I already know it.”

“And you’re satisfied with his explanation, then?”

“Not in the slightest.” He stretched up his back and loomed tall with a look down the long bridge of his nose toward his elder self. “Doctor!” he bellowed out. 

Ten’s reply was a husk in the wind more than a direct answer. “What?”

“Contact,” he commanded. “And that’s not a request.”

Ten spun so quickly at the command that his coat tails billowed out like a skirt caught in the wind. He stalked quickly toward them. “Alright. You want to see it all? Then take a good look and what the two of you become when you walk out of the regeneration fire and become me,” he growled out with an almost threatening tone of voice. “Contact.”

He heard both men repeat the word and felt their quick and eager intrusion into his mind. He didn’t bother letting either of them simply wade through the memories of Rose, he thrust it at both of them. One clip of memory after another thrown at them like frisbee disks tossed along a beach. He forced every single memory he had, all that he’d lost, all that he’d regained, the reasons why, and the painful journey he’d taken since their reunion to affirm just what she truly meant to him. He didn’t stop throwing memories at them until he felt both men pull out of his mind and stagger into reality with gasps and shudders. 

He didn’t look at either of them. Instead he closed his eyes and braced himself for what he knew was coming for him. He didn’t doubt at all that it would come – if he was in that man’s place, he’d do exactly the same thing to him.

“You stupid, arrogant, ignorant pigrat!” Nine levered out in a hot growl as his arm swung hard enough in the air that Ten could hear the split of the air around it. He didn’t hear the words that followed it as a large fist connected hard at his jaw with enough force to throw him off his feet. He landed on his hip on the tarmac but didn’t bother to rub out the sting of the punch. No. He wanted to feel that pain. He needed to.

“How _could_ you?” Nine continued in a lean over him. “Now get up so I can do that again.”

Ten remained on the ground but looked up with a fierce expression across his face. “I wish you could remember this,” he growled. “Remember it so when you’re in my position, you’ll actually understand.”

Eight let out a small sound of agreement. “It wasn’t his fault,” he admitted softly. “And punching him isn’t going to change what happened.”

“No, but it’ll make _me_ feel better,” Nine growled as he finally allowed himself to shake out the sting in his knuckles.

They all looked up at the stunned cry of their name from across the courtyard. Rose ran with such heavy footfalls that the dust from the gravel kicked up into small clouds from her feet. Both large wolves bounded behind her, with their little cub in the lead of them all. She dropped to her knees and skidded across the space that remained between herself and her fallen Time Lord. One of his arms opened to catch her against his chest and hung loosely behind her back.

“What happened?” she asked with worry in her voice as she cupped his face in both hands. She saw the reddening bruise on his jaw and her mouth fell open. “My God, Doctor. What happened?”

“I punched him,” Nine answered almost proudly from above her.

Her head shot upward. “Why’d you do that?”

“He deserved it?”

She shook her head and looked back down to her husband, shifting her palm off his cheek to survey the damage. “You okay?” she queried softly in a voice filled with concern.

“I love you,” he replied as though it was the only possible answer to her question.

“You never say it like that,” she said with soft curiosity. “ _Never_.” She leaned forward to press a series of soft kisses across the redness of his jaw. “My heart beats for you, too,” she said softly between kisses. She gasped and straightened her back to move in close to him when his arm snapped across her waist. “I think you should both go,” she advised flatly.

“Nope,” Nine replied indignantly. “Not goin’ anywhere right now.” He looked toward his younger self, who currently had a massive white wolf sniffing at his kneecaps. “You, Doctor?”

“Actually. I’m a bit scared to move right now,” he admitted with a light shake of worry in his voice. “This one looks hungry.”

“She recognises you,” Rose offered quietly. She pulled back from Ten and rose from her knees to a stand. She held her hand down to help him to his feet. Her next comment was spoken in a slightly strangled tone as she grunted under the weight of Ten who was pulling to a stand. “You might want to brace yourself.”

“For what?” he asked with wide eyes. It was a question answered by Tiallu, who let out a whining howl and reared up to put her front paws on his shoulders. Her entire back end rocked with the violent and fast excited swing of her tail as she happily licked at his face. The animal whined, howled, yapped and jumped on her back legs with excitement at seeing him after so long.

Nine’s brows levitated completely into his hairline. “Well, that’s a little bit disgusting. A face full of dog slobber…”

“Better than a face full of snapping teeth,” Rose offered with a shrug as she curled tightly into Ten’s side underneath his jacket. “Tiallu! Come here, baby. Leave Daddy alone. He’s got to go now.”

“You call a Dahrama _Baby_ ,” Nine drolled out flatly as he watched the large wolf almost immediately do as she was told and walk to Rose’s side. “They are anythin’ but.”

“Shows what you know,” Rose said with a sigh. She looked up into ten’s face, then curled her hand behind his head to draw him down to a tender kiss. She sighed when he pulled back and gave him a smile. “Time to go, you think? This lot have been taken care of, now.” She drew in a long breath. “And I really need to go home and hug the kids.” She inhaled. “Are you okay with a family bed tonight?”

“I’m just happy to be in there,” he answered with a small smile. “Need me to have the TARDIS cause an atmospheric disturbance to make sure the kids want to join us?”

“Thunderstorm snuggles,” she said with a chuckle. “Sounds like a plan. I’ll leave it in your hands, then.”

“Manipulating the youngsters,” Nine said with a smirk. “Sounds about right for the Doctor.” He exhaled and looked to the ramp of the ship, and to the throng of walking wounded Calgeil entering their ship – dragging their dead or unconscious behind them. “Speaking of manipulation. Don’t you have a call to make?”

“Ahh, yes,” he remembered with a wince on one side of his face. “Best do that before this lot show up on Narvin’s doorstep in the middle of a Gallifreyan night.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and waggled it toward the others then pointed to the wall at the very edge of the courtyard. “Just give me a moment to call Brax. No doubt you’ll hear the old boy yelling from here when he hears what I’ve got to tell him.” He lifted his chin to the sky as he walked and let out a pained sound as he held the phone to his ear and waited for it to connect.

“Why’s he calling Brax?” Rose asked curiously. She looked down to Soliarn, who was laid on the floor and gnawing at an itch in his paw. “Stand guard on Daddy, yeah?”

Soliarn let out the equivalent of a teenager’s sigh of annoyance but drew himself to a stand. He lowered his muzzle to his cub and took a firm hold of the youngster’s neck in his teeth. With a flick of his head, the cub was thrown into the air and landed on his father’s thick and furry back. Neroli obediently dropped his legs either side of Soliarn’s back and held on tight as the large wolf padded slowly across to the Doctor, who was in a shoulder lean against the wall.

“They’re rather oddly obedient,” Nine remarked with wide eyes.

“I’d noticed that,” Eight agreed. “Which is remarkable, really.” He looked to Rose with a wide smile. “Rose Tyler-Lungbarrow, the tamer of the wildest creatures in the universe. Able to flawlessly speak their language…” His smile shifted to an expression that held something else as he considered the other of the Universe’s untameable beasts she’d managed to tame. Namely himself and Irving Braxiatel. “You are amazing.”

“I haven’t used the Lungbarrow name in a very long time,” she said softly. “Not since Gallifrey.” There was no smile on her face as she folded her arms across her chest and turned to face the pair of them. “Well. It’s been … interesting … seeing the both of you again. If there ever happens to be a next time, any chance we can do it without an alien invasion?”

Nine’s brows pulled together and he let out a huff. “I’m not leaving when you’re mad at me,” he said with a sniff.

“Not mad,” she countered almost petulantly without looking at him.

“Yes, you are,” he said with a sigh. He walked over to her and put his arms around her shoulders, making it a point to look down at where she held her arms in a fold between them rather than hug him back. He exhaled and lifted his head to press a kiss in the centre of her brow. He kept his lips in place so that when he spoke, his cool breaths puffed against her skin. “He shared his memories of us. Of what happened. And I’m sorry, Rose, I got upset to see you treated that way.” He drew in a breath that ended up a warmer than typical inhale and held it a moment within him. “My hearts beat for you, Rose, in a way that is so all encompassing. I can’t imagine myself treating you like they don’t.”

She finally released the fold of her arms and thread them underneath the back of his jacket to hook around his waist. “At the end of the day, Doctor, it had to happen.” She didn’t want to lift her head and remove his lips from her brow, but did so anyway. “And it was for the better, yeah? I met younger you, I fell in love with you all over again. Fell in love with Gallifrey. Found my best friends in Romana and Brax, and have to wonderful children.” She held her ear against his chest. “And hopefully you’ll be agreeable to a couple more a little later on…”

“He’s agreeable now,” Eight offered. “You just need to ask.”

There was an expression of shock and surprise on her face, and she swallowed thickly. “Ehm. Only one infant in the family at a time, yeah?” she said with a look around Nine’s shoulder toward Eight.

His eyes opened wide. “Oh don’t tell me. Romana? She’s…?”

“Not yet,” she said with a wide smile. “But she’s made the request, so depending on how good the old boy is, it could happen sooner rather than later. I mean with us, it only took one time once we’d decided, so I’ll give him a good three shots at the goal to get the job done.”

“Crass, and yet, I’m not offended in the slightest,” Nine said with a smirk. “And while I want to start a pool amongst ourselves just for shits and giggles, it really does only take the one time. Once both parties are keen and the boys wake up, the job gets done pretty efficiently.”

“He’d be horrified to hear you talking like that about him,” Eight said with a shake in his head. “Both of you.” He groaned into his hand. “Honestly, _I’m_ horrified to hear you talking about him like this.”

“Nah,” she drawled. “He’s mellowed out a bit these days. New incarnation pulling the rod out of his arse and all that. A lot more fun to be around now.” She held her finger to her lips. “But, shhhh. Don’t tell my current Doctor what I told you, yeah? I’m not supposed to tell you.”

“Not great at keeping secrets, are you?” Nine said with affection in his chuckle.

“Not from you anyway,” she agreed. She then shifted out of his hold and pressed her finger into his chest. “You, on the other hand. Still full of them, and still not sharin’.”

“That’s because some of them shouldn’t be shared,” he defended with a look. “So it’s best you don’t push.”

“Course,” she said with a huff. “Maybe I should start keepin’ some from you, too. Hmmm? How’d you think you’d feel about that?”

“Hey, if you want to hold on to somethin’, then go ahead, Rose.” He smirked. “Don’t let me be a hypocrite and get all mad if you don’t want to tell me.”

“But I could never do that to you, you know that.” She inhaled. “Secrets hurt the ones you love, and I love you too much to hurt you like that.”

Her hand was snatched by Eight and she was quickly guided into a twirl with her arm above her head, which brought her into the chest of him. She let out a peep when he held her in a dance hold and rocked them gently to music only heard by him. 

“Run away with me,” he breathed against her ear. “Just the two of us, across time and space. Let’s run away together. Make love underneath the skies of alien planets. Dance inside the mists of creation.”

“Smooth,” Nine muttered with a sniff.

“Well, that came out of nowhere,” she murmured with a shake in her head at him. “And no. I’ve got a million reasons why I can’t do that.”

“If I give you one very good one, will that change your mind?”

“I’ve got responsibilities,” she reminded him. 

“Time Machine,” he reminded her. “I can spend a lifetime with you, and return you here to my older self before he’s even realised you’ve gone.”

“If you weren’t such a bad pilot…”

He stopped dancing and looked down into her eyes. There was a sad twinkle inside his that saddened further with the slow approach of the eldest of all of them. “We didn’t get to say goodbye properly,” he said sadly. “We were torn from each other. I couldn’t hold you. I couldn’t kiss you. I couldn’t show you just how very much my hearts beat for you.” He swallowed thickly. “This is my chance to do that; to show you, and to say goodbye properly.”

“Oh, Doctor,” she breathed out with her own level of sorrow deepening her voice. “I already know. I knew back then as well.”

“Please?” he pleaded softly. “Even just the once. One trip?”

Ten’s voice croaked in from behind him. “Rose. If you need that, I won’t argue.” He swallowed a lump. “I’ll wait for you in London. However long you need.” He looked off to one side. “Maybe it’ll even keep you safe until we can deal with…” He looked down and exhaled. “You need him. I understand that.”

“I need _you_ ,” she corrected him. She waited until he looked up enough that she could catch his gaze and then looked up at the man who was begging her to run away with him. “We had our time, Doctor. We did. And we had a wonderful life together, and I don’t want to change a single part of it...” she swallowed. “Even our goodbye. Stuck on separate sides of an unbreakable wall…”

“Please?” he asked again. “Just one more time?”

“Our time can’t come again,” she reminded him gently as she wiped a tear from her eye. “And despite the lie this one told me; I know you’ve lived a lifetime without me.” She smiled. “And lived that lifetime well. Putting me back in it now – it just hurts both of us. Me, moreso than you. An’ I don’t want to hurt anymore.”

“You’re my past now.” She looked toward Ten. “And him? He’s my past, my present, and I hope to all that he’s every day of the future I have ahead of me.” At Ten’s smile and nod of agreement, she looked back to Eight and stepped backward to walk into Ten’s arms, up tight against his chest. She pulled his arms to circle her shoulders and let out a contented sigh. “He’s the sum of all three of you, of _all_ of you. He knows, he remembers, and he cherishes all those moments we had together.”

“I do,” he assured against her ear as he tightened his arms around her.

She spoke a flawlessly recited Gallifreyan term of love and devotion to him with a light waver of emotion inside her voice. She offered him every promise he could ever ask of her and vowed to be everything he ever needed her to be for the rest of their lives together. She felt the shudder inside the man who held her, and saw it in the one she recited the words to.

Nine shuddered out a long breath. “I really need to get back to London.”

“Gods, Rose,” Eight breathed out with a whimper. “You expect me to walk away from you after that?”

“Yes, I do,” she said with a sniff. “But only because I know that when you leave, you’ll forget all about me again. It won’t matter to you that I just said what I did.” She lifted her head to Ten. “But him. It’ll matter to him.”

Eight exhaled slowly and nodded his head. “You’ve made your choice, then. Him over me.”

“Please don’t say it like that.”

He lifted his head. It surprised her to see that he wore a tender smile despite the redness in his eyes. “Oh, Rose. Don’t mistake this…” he pointed to his eyes. “For being upset about your decision. I’m not. I’m actually really, really, happy that you did.”

“What do you mean?”

“You ended up in my TARDIS because of the heartbreak that one caused you. You were ready to leave him, ready to leave it all. Give it all up _because_ of him.” His eyes flicked to Nine when he gave a displeased grunt. He looked back to Rose and softened the hardness of the gaze he had on his elder self. “And now. You’ll give it all up _for_ him – that’s all I could ever hope for your future, Rose.”

She hiccupped, but nodded.

“Of course, the invitation is still very much open, Rose. And if you have even a small change of heart…” He gave her a hopeful grin.

She shook her head and pulled Ten’s arms more tightly around her. “My universe, right here.” Her eyes widened. “And in London. The kids.” She spun inside Ten’s arms. “We really should go.”

“We should,” he agreed. “Brax is in a right snit at the moment, and it’s best we don’t dawdle any longer.” He drew in a deep breath. “No doubt he’s arranging a rather extensive search party for us right now.”

“Time Machine,” Nine reminded him.

“ _Irving Braxiatel_ ,” Ten countered darkly.

“Yeah,” he agreed with a wince. “Trumped me on that one. Best the both of you head off, then.” 

Ten released her and dropped a hand to take her hand in his. “Wish I could say it was a pleasure, but really. It was nothing close to that. Let’s not do this again any time soon, yeah?” He tugged on Rose’s hand to draw her in beside him and blew a whistle to the wolves. “Come on you lot. Fun’s over. Time to go home.”

“Wait!” Rose peeped out. She tugged her hand from his and jogged quickly back to the other two Doctors. She sighed when she threw her arms around Nine and was lifted off the floor with the force of his arms that snapped around her waist. “I love you,” she breathed out with a light squeal over his nose and forehead.

“And my hearts beat for you as well,” he vowed gently as he set her feet on the floor and kissed at her lips, the tip of her nose, and then the centre of her brow. “Take care of him, yeah?”

“Promise.” She wriggled out of his hold and moved swiftly toward Eight. Her embrace of him was much different than the one she’d gone for with Nine. Her arms slid around him slowly, and her feet remained on the floor when he returned her embrace. “My love for you, Doctor…”

“I know, Hearts,” he said with a nod of his head as he dipped to press his lips gently against hers. He held her lips against his for a moment, and then released her gently to press his forehead against hers. “Until we meet again...” He held her hand against his chest. “They won’t beat for another.”

“Don’t make a promise you can’t keep,” she whispered sadly. “And who am I to expect you to?”

“I expect myself to,” he vowed.

“But you’re going to forget me again,” she said with a sigh. “You have to.”

“Forget _you_ , maybe,” he said. “But not my promise to you.”

“I want to believe you.”

“Ask him,” he urged her. “Ask him and tell him I told you to demand he tell you the truth.” He looked to Ten. “Did they beat for another after today?”

Ten shook his head. “They barely beat at all.” He held out his hand. “Come on, Rose. We have to go.”

Rose lifted up onto her toes and pressed a fast kiss to his lips. “Love you,” she said quickly. “Bye!”

Both Nine and Eight watched as she bounded up after Ten. Her hand curled immediately into his, and they walked with her wrapped around his arm. Either side of them walked two large wolves, one of them with a cub sleeping on his shoulders.

Eight sighed. “Gods, I can’t wait until I’m him.”

“Neither can I,” he admitted. “And I _have_ my own Rose back in London.”

“Well,” Eight said after Rose and her Doctor had disappeared from sight. “I best be off as well. Not entirely unpleasant I suppose.”

“If you say so.” He exhaled. “So? Time to forget what we saw today, Doctor. Contact?”

“Contact,” he agreed with a small whine. “Guess we better get this over and done with.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

There was a slight clouding inside his head as the Ninth Doctor staggered lightly through the marketplace. Although he’d landed in what he believed to be the early morning, and only a handful of microspans must have passed since materialisation, it seemed to be getting late into the afternoon.

Odd.

The marketplace itself seemed to be a little let well manicured than normal. Plenty of dust and debris surrounding him, and very little in the way of milling patrons. Those that were engaging in a little shopping and negotiating seemed to be partaking their activities hidden indoors rather than out on the patios.

Odd.

Perhaps the local garbage crews were on strike? He pressed his lips together and shrugged. Probably. He’d heard of some union unrest in this part of the galaxy before landing. Although he thought that was on Kucali, not kucail. Easy mistake to make, really…

He looked down at his hand and frowned at a small bunch of bananas that hung from his fingers. Seemed odd that he’d come all this way only to pick up a small bunch. Typically he’d stock up big and hope that Rose might fix up some of her banana baking goodness for him to scarf down when she wasn’t looking…

Speaking of not looking. His forward momentum took him toward a collision with dangerous looking chap wearing a full black combat outfit and helmet set. He carried on his arm a sizeable tablet and seemed rather focused on the photograph and dossier of someone on the screen.

Ooh, interesting.

He managed to stop before he collided with the chap, and took a second to peer over his shoulder at the tablet. What he saw, the large logo in the very corner of the screen, blew his eyes wide.

CIA? But weren’t they all gone? Dead? 

He held his breath as his eyes shifted to another part of the screen. The two faces were unrecognisable to him, but the names listed underneath them weren’t. Doctor and Irving Braxiatel – beside which was an order for execution by order of the Lord President of Gallifrey. Last seen on Estrail, suspected appearance on Kucail.

His eyes hardened as his expression fell into annoyance. This was obviously a future thing, and while he had no idea at all what any of this meant at all, he figured he’d better get his hands on that tablet and hide it somewhere in the TARDIS for his elder self to find when the time was right. With a pull at the bunch of fruit in his hand, he snapped off a single banana.

“Stop where you are,” he growled into the agent’s ear as he poked the end of the banana into his back like one would a gun. “This is a robbery, give me your staser and your tablet….”

~~ooooOOOOooo~~


	36. Breaking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A family bed is not always the most effective way to ensure a good night sleep. And some people should never be allowed to travel on their own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why no chapter yesterday? Because right at the very last moment I had something thrown at me that took me into the early evening, thereby not giving me any writing time at all...
> 
> Today I had better luck and therefore strove to do a double-chapter worth of writing to make up for it. I present to you almost 10.000 words of pure and utter drivel.
> 
> HA!
> 
> Seriously. Brax and Rose heavy for much of it. And awfully deep and emotional for it as well. Figured it was time to air something out and get rid of it once and for all. And I didn't feel like it would work out quite as effectively (or end as well) if the discussion took place between the Doctor and Rose. So this is what you get instead. 
> 
> For the second part of this offering I do only have one comment for you in case you're wondering: No, Rose cannot regenerate. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy. I'm hoping that this'll roller coaster you just a wee bit.... :)

~~ooooOOOOooo~~

As was typical when Rose opted to have a family bed rather than sleep alone, she didn’t get a very decent chance of getting any actual sleep. While they’d all dropped off within minutes of forming a four-person snuggle fest lit by the flashes of TARDIS-induced lightning outside, it didn’t take long for the squirming to start. It also didn’t take all that long for the tight pack of vertically straight-lined bodies to start to twist and turn and lie in a more horizontal manner.

Rose had managed to maintain a somewhat light sumber, such was her conditioning, but it was a constant battle against fingers and toes up her nose, across her face, and digging into places that no tiny fingers should be poking at. So, when Mark finally gave up and decided to climb over the top of his mother to get out of bed and head into his own room, Rose was already well and truly awake. Mark managed to get an arm and leg either side of her, his small face over the top of hers when he worked out his mum was still awake.

“Sorry,” he muttered quietly, his nose against hers as he looked sleepily into her eyes. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t think that climbing over me like a monkey would have that result?”

He slumped to put his entire weight on her belly, his forehead on her chin. “Had little other option, really.”

She gave him a cuddle and kissed the top of his head. “Roadblock Aly is a hard one to get by, isn’t she?”

He looked to where his sister was lying almost completely sideways with her head against her father’s chest and let out a breath. “For someone that little, she certainly takes up a lot of room.” He lifted his head. “I’m gonna try and get some sleep in my bed. Got a test at school in the morning, best I get a bit of sleep, yeah?”

Rose nodded slowly. “Need me to arrange to postpone it for you? Call you in sick, maybe?” She tenderly ran her thumb along his sweaty little cheekbone. “You can hang out with your father for the day. He’ll love it.”

“Tempting, but Nah,” he drawled with a whisper. “Easy peasy one, really, that I should get over and done with. Could do it _in_ my sleep.” He let out a breath as a wide yawn he didn’t bother to cover with his hand. “And besides, Tonza Brax is pretty strict on me going to school every day. All about education, that one.”

“I outrank him, you know.”

“He doesn’t think so,” he whispered with a sigh. “He says you’re an enabler to my mischief, so he needs to step in and be the adult.” He gave her a kiss on her cheek. “Anyway, I’m tired. Night night, mum. Love you.”

“Love you, too, baby,” she breathed out with a pat on his behind as he finally crawled off the bed and let out a wide yawn as he padded out of the room. She watched him walk and waited until she heard his bedroom door closed before she rolled back onto the mattress and stared up at the ceiling. At her side, she heard her daughter let out the softest of sleepy whimpers, which was answered by a small snuffle and indecipherable mutter of comfort from her father.

Nice that the both of them were completely out for the count. She wasn’t. She was now properly awake. It was halfway tempting to poke and prod at the both of them to wake them up, but she didn’t need the full day of tantrums that came from Alirra when she hadn’t gotten enough sleep.

She considered trying to get back to sleep and wanted to use the soft sounds of her husband and their daughter sleeping beside her to lull her back into slumber, but when Alirra’s foot jabbed painfully into her side, Rose gave up. With a hard sigh, she slowly rolled out of the bed and padded on bare feet to the doorway. She wore long flannel pyjama pants and a loose sleep shirt but grabbed her short robe by sheer habit. She slipped it on and tied it as the waist with a yawn and a stretch and carefully navigated her way down the stairs without switching on the light.

There was no surprise at all that there was a light on in the living room. Braxiatel had been somewhat purple with rage when she and the Doctor had returned from Kucail, and the two Time Lord brothers had gotten into a heated argument about it despite neither of them being to blame for what had happened. It took Romana stepping in between them to calm the situation down any. Bless that woman, she’d sent both of them to opposite ends of the house and barred them from even looking in each other’s direction for the next twenty-four hours…

…And they’d actually listened to her.

So that said, it made sense that Brax would be burning the midnight oil trying to work a solution of sorts to the breach of the CIA network. If such a breach existed. The heat in the room had left Rose far too timid to suggest that perhaps there was a leak in the Agency, but it was what she believed to be the case here. As far as she knew, Braxiatel’s security coding hadn’t been beaten by anyone – not even the Doctor – so it made little sense that it was hacked into so easily now by an amateur.

She stepped into the living room, which was lit only by a holo-display of a Gallifreyan portable computer system. Looking across from the back of the couch, she could easily tell it was Braxiatel at the keyboard. Even though he was navigating himself inside a new regeneration, which could have provided her at least a little question as to the identity of him, the set of his shoulders and the sharp focus on what he was doing left no doubt at all. It seemed that this posture was definitely a trait that would hold across all incarnations. 

She approached slowly from behind, ready to give him a “Boo” to startle him. But the annoyed grunt and hard finger poke at the enter button warned her that he was frustrated. Startling him was probably not the best course of action to take unless she wanted to be on the receiving end of his ire. Instead she hummed out a sound of warning that she was in the room with him.

“Morning Brax,” she ventured without the usual chirp of greeting in her voice. She was too tried to even try to fake it.

“Three AM is still night, Rose,” he corrected her with shortness in his tone. He didn’t take his eyes off the monitor, nor the hand he held at his chin as he let his eyes scan the information on the screen. “You need your sleep. Go back to bed.”

“Can’t,” she breathed out with a light whimper. She dared lean over the back of the couch with her arms around his head and shoulders and kissed at his cheek. “My bed is full of a tiny little girl who knows how to take up the entire bed and a husband who’s too much of a sap to move her.”

He brought up a hand to hold at the cross of her forearms at his chest. There was firm tenderness in his voice. “Then go sleep in her bed.”

“You’ve seen the size of her bed, haven’t you?” She sighed. “No bigger than Tiallu’s bed.”

“Romana doesn’t take up a lot of room,” he offered, his eyes still on the monitor. “Go take my place with her for the rest of the night. I’m quite sure she won’t mind. In fact, she would probably appreciate the company.”

She rested her head against his and looked at the display ahead of him. It held several windows that cascaded across what looked like two displays rather than just the one. She could read parts of it, the simpler pieces of data, but for the most part it looked far too complicated to even try.

“What are you doing?” She asked.

He petted her arm with his hand. “I take it that’s a no on joining Romana, then.”

“Not tired anymore,” she said with a yawn against his ear.

“Oh, obviously not,” he drawled out sarcastically. “Yawning is in no way an indication of one’s fatigue or tiredness.”

“Plenty of reasons for us to yawn than just tiredness, Brax,” she said with a huff as she released him from her hold and straightened up to a stand. She kicked up a leg to climb up over the back of the couch and dropped onto the cushion beside him. “So, what are you doing, anyway?”

He looked up at the back of the couch and then made an effort to let her know that he was unimpressed with the way she climbed over the couch to sit with him with a deliberate look at the path she took. “You know full well that I chide the children for doing what you just did.”

She hummed and shrugged. “And I support you chiding them for it.”

“Yet, you do the same thing.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You know, you’re trying awfully hard to evade my question, Brax, which is awfully rude of you.”

A voice from the armchair snorted out. “Rude certainly does seem to be his default setting, Rose.”

Rose gasped out with startled fright and flinched back hard into the couch cushions. Her hand held at her chest trying to tame her thundering heart. “God!”

“Ahh no,” Narvin said with a slight chuckle. “Not quite.”

“I – I didn’t see you there,” she said with a light pant in her breathing. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Being invisible really is part of my job,” he said with a light smile on one side of his mouth. “I’m used to not being seen by others. Quite prefer it that way if I’m being honest.” His smile stretched to the other side of his mouth. “Pleasure to see you again.”

She swallowed. “Give me a chance for my heart to stop hammering in my chest and I’ll say the same to you.” Beside her, Braxiatel chuckled lightly. She slapped his arm. “You could’ve told me he was there, Brax!”

“Why would I do that?” he queried with a shrug. “When he’s trying so hard to be invisible?”

“You arse,” she accused with a shake in her head. “Anyway. Going to go fix myself a coffee.” She looked to Narvin. “You want one?”

“If it’s not too much bother,” he answered with a smile and a nod. “I’d definitely appreciate it.”

“I’ll have one as well,” Braxiatel said with a smile.

“Yeah, you have two hearts and two legs,” she countered as she walked to the hallway. She pointed a finger at him and flicked it in the air toward the kitchen. “You can go get your own.”

“You’re in my hearts,” he countered almost facetiously as though it would be the one thing he could say that would have her make him a strong brew.

“Not buying into it,” she called around the wall.

He chuckled as he went back to task. The chuckle and accompanying smile fell fast as he leaned forward and his hand came up to cup his chin. “I don’t understand, Narvin,” he said after a moment. “I’ve gone through this over and over again, and I can’t see any part of this coding that would allow a non CIA entity into the network.” He huffed out with annoyance. “I can’t explain it.”

Narvin leaned forward in his chair, finally revealing himself from the shadows. He leaned his elbows into his knees and shook his head as he let out a hard exhale. “That’s very worrying.”

“I can try and fortify it further,” he offered with a light tap of his finger on the trackpad of the keyboard. “But it’s moot, really. I’ve tried every possible avenue that one might take to get in, and I can’t bypass any of the security protocols.”

“I know,” he stated quietly. “I’ve been repeatedly notified of your attempts. Even if you could get by just one layer of security…”

“You get a ping and I get shut down,” Braxiatel muttered with a nod. “Yes, which is how I intended for it to work.” He lifted his eyes to his old friend. “I don’t want to make any accusations, but there really is only one other possibility.”

“That I have a rat in the Agency,” he admitted with a slow nod of his head. “I really had hoped that wasn’t the case.”

“Do you have any idea who it could be?”

Narvin shook his head. “It could be any number of Agents,” he said with a huff as he sat back hard in the chair. “Rassilon increased Agency numbers by 300% when the war closed…”

“I didn’t think there were that many people left in the Capitol.”

“Many of them were from the fighting infantry,” he clarified. “At the end of the war, with the state of Gallifrey, many couldn’t return to their pre-war occupations.” He exhaled with a sad shake in his head. “Nothing left for them to return to, really. The planet is decimated. The only thing they could be given to earn a wage and support their families was a role within the CIA.”

Braxiatel snorted. “Rather have been killed in the war…”

“And you think you’re better off here with a bounty on your head?” he argued. “Exiled from Gallifrey and all you’ve ever fought for and forced to hide like a ground mole?” He leaned an elbow down on one of the chair’s armrests and cradled his jaw in his fingers. “Having to sneak around, watch your back, hide in the shadows…”

“It’s worked well enough for you for several centuries, Narvin.” He said with a flick of his eyes toward him. He looked back to the display. “And the life I have here right now isn’t bad, all things considered.”

He shifted his eyes to Braxiatel. “You once told me that family was best when it wasn’t in your face, when it was done from afar.” He tilted his head curiously. “Your mind has been changed on that?”

“Depends on the family member you’re referring to,” he answered with a shrug. “Some of them are a joy to be around. Others? Not so much.”

Rose chuckled as she entered the room with a pair of mugs in her hands. “Oh, you love being around him, Brax. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“I wouldn’t say _love_ ,” he disagreed with a smirk. He took a mug from her and smiled his thanks as he took an immediate sip of it. “Oh, now this is what makes being around family worth it. A good mouthful of coffee beautifully stained with the throat burn of that Mountaineer moonshine.”

“Just a dash,” she said with a wink. “Because I think you need a hit of something stronger than caffeine right now.” She pressed a hand on the coffee table to lean forward and pass Narvin his own steaming cup. “There you go. I’ve got a full pot brewed and staying hot in the kitchen if you need anymore.”

His smile was wide as he leaned forward and inhaled a deep sniff of the aroma through his nose. He looked up at her with genuine gratitude in his eyes. “Thank you very much, Rose. Your hospitality is very much appreciated.”

Rose looked toward Braxiatel. “Hear that, Brax? The pair of words that begins with the letters: ‘T’ and ‘Y’? That’s what you’re supposed to say when someone takes the time and effort to do something for you.” She looked to Narvin. “You are very welcome. If you need anything else, you just let me know.”

“I don’t wish to be any imposition to you, but I thank you.”

“Oh, I like you,” she said with a light giggle. She looked to Braxiatel. “Can we keep him?”

“No Rose, we can’t.” Braxiatel lifted his eyes to Narvin. “Do you mind? You’re making me look bad here.”

“You don’t need my help with that.” He drew back a mouthful and purred longingly at the taste on his tongue. “Wonderful. Simply wonderful.”

Rose grabbed a small cushion from the edge of the couch and took a seat beside Braxiatel. With no words at all, she put the cushion on his lap and patted it for comfort. She then kicked up her feet to lay along the couch and set her head on top of the cushion.

Both men looked at her with very wide eyes, but it was Braxiatel who actually chose to make comment on the fact that her head was now on his lap. “Ehm. Rose? Just what are you doing?”

“Getting comfortable,” she answered. “So I can watch what the two of you are up to.”

“And that requires you to put your head on my lap?”

“I want the couch, and you’re on it,” she answered with a shrug and a wriggle to get more comfortable. “So, yes. Would you like to move?”

His eyes narrowed. “This is usually where I’d get as bullheaded as you usually are and say: No. I’m good with it if you are…”

“Then okay.” She said with a smile. “Stay. You’re quite comfy.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” he huffed. “I said that I’d _normally_ get bullheaded. However, this is a situation where bullheadedness will only get the two of us in trouble if either one of our mates happens to walk in the room. I’ll move.”

“Oh grow up,” she huffed.

“You’re the one with your head on my lap,” he countered. “You ask me…”

“Which I’m not.” She rolled onto her back to look up at him. She opened her mouth to speak and really only managed to exhale a full breath out of her mouth. There was an oddly uncharacteristic look of defeat and upset in her eyes as she shifted her shoulders and made to get up. “Fine. I’ll get up.”

He stopped her with his hand on her shoulder and looked down at her with question. “Are you okay?”

“Peachy,” she answered with a roll in her eyes.

“No, you’re not,” he observed with a sigh in his voice and a light wince of apology on his face. “Which reminds me that I never did ask you how you felt about what happened on Kucail, did I?”

“You don’t typically ask about my feelings,” she remarked with a one-sided smile. “And ‘sides. Fighting with your brother was far more important.”

He arched his chest downward to look into her eyes in the analytic manner he used when worried about what was stirring within her. He tsked and shook his head as he let one arm circle around her head and leaned the other across her belly. “Okay. Aside from what I already know about, what happened?”

“You mean aside from meeting my husband – who had no clue who I was – and who then tried to pick me up and take me across the universe with him?”

“Okay, I didn’t know about that,” he admired with a pinch in his brows. “Thete might’ve forgotten to mention that.”

“Or you were too busy wanting to rip him apart when we materialised, which then got you put in time out by Romana…”

“There is that,” he said with a sigh. He then tenderly stroked her head. “I’m very sorry, Rose. I fully expected that Thete would have gotten you out of there the moment he saw his younger self…”

Narvin laughed at that. “Like you can talk,” he challenged.

“Do you mind?”

“Not often,” he answered quickly as he drew back another taste of his beverage. “Oh, this really is quite good, you know.”

Rose looked up at Brax. “Any chance that either you or the Doctor could tinker with a Nespresso machine so it’ll work on Gallifrey? Might be nice for Narvin to have one in his office for those long nights stuck behind his desk.”

“Thete’s the tinkerer,” he said with a shrug. “Not me. But I’m sure if you ask him, he’ll acquiesce to your will. Will probably modify and upgrade it while he’s at it.”

She rolled her head to look toward Narvin. “If I can get it arranged, you want?”

“I would very much appreciate it,” he answered with a smile.

“Consider it done,” she said with a sigh and a roll of her body to match the positioning of her head. “In the meantime, I think I might see if I can sleep.”

Braxiatel sighed and settled himself a little more comfortably in the seat, resigned to having her head on a cushion in his lap for the next little while. “Fine,” he said on a breath. “Of course, you know this means it’ll only make my work here more awkward.”

“Bit like my entire life over the last few years, yeah?” she said with a soft sigh.

He didn’t answer to that one, although he sorely wanted to. Really, what _could_ he say to her? He made do with simply stroking her hair with one hand as he quietly spoke with Narvin about how to further strengthen the security of the server and tighten the accesses now that he was in it.

Rose wasn’t listening to them at all. Her eyes were wide and unfocused as she let her mind swing back over to her morning, and the enlightening adventure she’d had with not one, but three incarnations of her husband … and to the revelation that had probably hit her harder than losing him in the first place.

Another lover.

She hadn’t quite had time to wrap her mind around that one. While one part of her couldn’t fault him for finding comfort in the arms of another in the 400-odd years he didn’t know who she was, it was a very _very_ small part. The rest of her felt a rather large mixture of anger and hurt about it. That angry part of her wanted to know who this woman was, to find her, and to growl territorially at her. The hurt part of her wanted to make sure that this woman was at the very least a good person... Someone worthy of her heart breaking over.

She tried to picture what this woman must have looked like. Was she blonde or brunette? Was she beautiful, or plain? Was she human, or another Time Lord? Why did they ultimately separate? Did they simply grow apart over time, was she somehow taken from him by death or some other means?

So many questions. She really wanted answers.

“Brax?” she whispered quietly, not entirely sure if she wanted to get his attention or not.

Time Lord hearing meant she got his attention well enough. “Yes, Rose?”

She swallowed back a lump and held herself as steadily as she could. “C-Can you tell me about her?”

The hand on top of her hair stilled in it’s gentle stroking. “Tell you about who?” His voice was low and deep, an indication to her that he had a feeling just who she was referring to without having to ask.

“The one he fell in love with”, she answered, not knowing the name of the woman. She felt the flow of an escaped tear roll from the corner of her eye and across the upper bridge of her nose to fall with a quiet splat onto the cushion. 

“Narvin,” he said with quiet urgency. “Can you give us a minute?”

“Yeah,” he answered with knowing in his tone. “I need to refresh my coffee, anyway.”

Rose shifted her head with the intent to look at him, but only managed to get sight of the bottom length of his black and white tunic. ‘Milk’s in the fridge, sugar on the counter.”

“Thank you,” he answered gratefully as he left the room.

Rose waited until she knew he was outside of earshot and let out a light groan as she lifted herself from Braxiatel’s knees. She didn’t lift her eyes to him, instead she let her head hang low and pressed her hands into the cushions either side of her hips. “I need to know, Brax.”

“How did you find out,” he asked with a deep voice that held the slightest bit of frustration.

“It slipped out,” she admitted as her eyes fell on the rock on her finger that had brought about the admission. She lifted her hand and admired the ring a moment before she removed it and set it on the table. She pointed toward it and then drew her hand back to rub at the base of her now naked finger. “He saw that and told me he’d been looking for it to give to her.”

“Oh Hell, Rose,” he muttered with rub of his eyes with his thumb and index finger. He then picked it up and handed it back to her. “Please put it back on.”

“I don’t know if I should,” she said with a gulp. “I mean, yes he gave it to me … but then he fell into another woman’s bed and decided he wanted to give it to her instead.”

“You’re making it sound so much more simple – and much more sordid – that it really was.” He tried again to give it back or her. “Please. Don’t let him see you without it.”

She lifted her head to look at him, face to face. There were tears in her eyes and tear tracks down her cheeks. “Was she at least a nice person?”

“You need to speak to Thete about this,” he urged. “Not me.” He thrust the ring at her again. “Please, Rose. Please put this back on.”

She let up a laugh and looked to the ceiling. “He’s not going to talk to me about it, Brax. God, if he was, he’d have brought her up by now, don’t you think?” She looked back at him. “I just need to know, was she a _nice_ person? Did she love him as much as he loved her?” She inhaled deep. “Because I need to know that. I need to know that if he …” She swallowed with a wince. “That if he found love again, that she was worthy of it.”

He held the ring up to her with the tips of his thumb and fingers. “I don’t beg, Rose. It’s not in me to do so, but I’m really going to beg and plead with you on this.” He was more forceful with the presentation of the bauble to her. “Please put this back on.”

She huffed out a hard breath and shook her head. With a wipe of her hands on her thighs, she pushed herself to a stand. Her arms immediately folded tightly across her chest in a self-comforting hold of herself. “Why can’t you just answer my question?” she growled as she showed her hand with its naked and bare fourth finger. “Why are you more concerned about whether or not I’m wearing the ring?”

He stood quickly, grabbed her hand in his and slipped the ring back onto her finger. “Don’t take that off again,” he demanded as he held that hand inside of both of his. “I don’t like what you taking it off implies.”

“There’s no implication to be had,” she said with a roll in her eyes. “It was just a … oh, I dunno … a statement. The one thing that finally brought about the confession that he’d fallen in love with someone else.”

His head shook and the look in his eyes was one of fierce warning. “That ring was given to you by my brother. You accepted it as his token of the love he has for you. To our people, taking it off is a rejection of everything he feels for you.” He was clearly angered by it. “I will take any anger, hostility, upset, and dramatics you want to throw in my direction over what you’ve suffered this past while. I’ll wear all of it on his behalf without question and support you as best I can.” He opened his hands to reveal hers between them. “But I won’t – under any circumstances – allow you to so blatantly and carelessly throw the beat of his hearts back at him because you’re in a snit about something that you’ve sorely overblown and overestimated in your mind.”

“In a snit,” she repeated as she pulled her hand forcibly from between his. Her eyes flared with anger. “My heart breaks because I find out that while I was suffering and alone, he was off flitting about the universe falling in love and sharing a bed with another woman, and you call it a _snit_.”

“You were _never_ alone,” he corrected her sharply. “Never. Romana and I have been with you every day in your timeline since you were torn from each other. We did our very best to make sure that no matter the circumstances you and your children were _never_ alone.”

Her voice softened to a whimper of apology. “And don’t think for a second that I don’t appreciate and love you for what you’ve done for us,” she said. “I do, Brax. I love you more than you will ever know. I could never have survived any of this without you.” She lifted her head and drew in a shaking breath. “But neither you nor Romana could possibly ever take away the loneliness that comes from losing a lover. You could never hold me like him. Love me like he did. Make me feel completion like he did. Losing him left a void inside me that could never be filled by anyone else – no matter how much they tried.” Her voice shuddered and her shoulders shook. “And to know that he got that from someone else, and that he didn’t have to suffer like I did. That hurts more than losing him did.”

“I know,” he ventured empathetically despite not fully understanding the pain of it himself. How could he?

“Was she worth it?” she asked with a lift of her eyes to his. “The woman he loved. Was she good enough for him.”

“He’d argue that he’s the one not good enough,” he answered with a hard exhale. His eyes shifted away from her for only a moment as he considered the best track to take if he was going to be the one forced to answer her questions. “But, yes. Charlotte was a good woman – as far as humans go anyway.”

“Charlotte,” she repeated in a whisper more for herself than asking him to confirm the name.

“Charley, he called her,” Braxiatel added with a much more levelled confidence in his tone. “Born in the early twentieth century on Earth to wealthy, aristocratic family.” He cleared his throat and frowned. “Although that’s quite irrelevant, I suppose.”

“Was she a good person” she pressed again. “That’s all I need to know.”

“She was,” he clarified with a nod of his head. “Quite a remarkable young woman, I suppose. Intriguing and pleasant on the eyes.” 

“You seem to know a lot about her.”

He flicked his eyes to hers. “Not for any reason you’re assuming,” he said softly. “She and Thete met under very dangerous temporal circumstances. When he saved her, he intercepted and changed a fixed point that led to anti-time being released into the universe. It is _this_ that captured my attention toward her as it is my – was – my job to eliminate and counter such circumstances. I never met her personally, and quite frankly had no real desire to do so.” He sniffed with disdain. “A walking fracture in the timeline, an anomaly that should have put his hair on end and made him ill.” He shuddered but straightened himself up. “Of course, while all other Time Lords would have worked to set the timelines back on their proper track to eliminate those somewhat queasy feelings of the walking anomaly in stride at their side, Thete took it as a challenge and made it his mission to protect her.”

“And in time fell in love with that anomaly,” she said with a long and high-pitched sigh. She looked off to the side and closed her eyes as she shook her head slowly. “Of course he did.”

“Whether or not his hearts began to beat for her is a question only Thete can answer,” he answered her with a light frown of apology. “My own thoughts are no, that they merely resided in each others hearts rather than requiring the other to keep them beating.” He petted the space in between his own hearts. “Only the owner of them can tell you for sure.”

She nodded slowly and looked off to one side. “Yeah.”

He reached out to hold her arm in one of his hands. “There is something you can take from me, though,” he offered. “Something that I know to be fact.”

She looked at him. “And what’s that?”

“It was an unconsummated affair,” he offered gently. “His virtue was left intact.”

She snorted. “And how do you know that?” she challenged. “Because he told you that?”

He shook his head slowly. “He wouldn’t have needed to, and I never asked.” The expression in his eyes was soft and sincere. “Because I now for a fact if he’d crossed that line with her. If his hearts truly beat for her, then he wouldn’t have simply resigned himself to her loss like he did. He would have fought the entire universe and all of reality to get back what was his.” He cupped her face in a tender hand. “Like he would for you.”

She cupped her hand over his and leaned her cheek heavily into their hands. “I want to believe you, Brax. I really do.” She blinked a tear. “But if what you’re saying is true, and that his hearts were still mine – why was he looking for your mother’s ring to give her.”

“That’s a question only he can answer, Rose,” he said softly. “And it’s not one I’m going to even try to answer for you.” He pressed his lips together and dropped his hand from her face to take her left hand in his. He drew it to his lips and kissed the stone softly. “But I know that he gave this to you. It’s yours. As are both of his beating hearts.” He lifted his eyes to hers. “Don’t you ever doubt the depth of his feelings for you. He’s here, now. He wants you to take his hearts, hold them, and never ever give them back.”

“I love him,” she admitted with a high whimper. “So damn much it’s killin’ me. I’m so scared of losing him again. I – I won’t survive it.”

“None of us will let that happen,” he promised her. “Never again. Like it or not, you’re stuck with that insufferable fool for the rest of your life.”

“I think I need to break,” she whimpered as she lifted a hand to cover at her mouth. “Brax, I’m too tired to hold it back anymore.” She panted against her hand as her tears dribbled down over her fingers. “I don’t want to break alone, but I can’t break in front of him. Help me?”

He uttered one of the milder Gallifreyan swears and trust himself forward to snatch her inside his arms. He held her tightly against his chest and dropped his nose into her hair as she collapsed against him. He dipped at the knees awkwardly against her sudden weight, but in that awkward position he managed to hold them both in a stand. “Come here,” he offered firmly as he turned his head to press his cheek onto the top of her head and closed his eyes against her shaking. “I’ve got you, Rose. Break. I’ll hold you together as best I can.”

When her arms circled tightly around his waist and she erupted into great, gulping sobs, he opened his eyes to look across the room into the darkness. In the darkened archway that led to the stairwell he saw the figure of his brother hidden in the shadows. The Doctor stood with a stiffness in his shoulders that lent a looming and powerful posture to him. To anyone it would be a figure to strike fear inside their heart, but to the brother of him, this wasn’t a proud and looming man lurking in the shadows; it was a man standing inside his own indecision of just which pathway he wanted to take right now: Run to, run from, or merely stand in quiet penance to his mate’s heartbreak.

He took a step forward but Braxiatel held up a hand to him. A stop sign to put him in a holding pattern between all three of those indecisions. He kept his hand held up and his eyes on him as he spoke gently to help the woman in his arms work through her despair. It was a rare moment that Rose would break and finally release her emotions, and he was going to let her shatter completely against him if she needed it. He also knew beyond all doubt if Thete stepped in right now, that she’d swallow it all back down and pretend she was perfectly fine… Even though she was anything but, right now.

It took a very long moment for her gulping sobs to finally ebb off into hiccups and whimpers. She found more strength in her legs to stand support her own weight and loosened the tight, choking hold she had of her arms around his waist. She still fell against him, but at least now he wasn’t trying to hold the both of them up on their feet.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered wetly against his chest and the silk fabric of the waistcoat he wore over a crisp white dress shirt.

“No apology needed,” he said with his eyes still on his brother lurking in the shadows. “At least, not from you.” He drew in a breath. “Not really from him, either, I suppose.”

“I hate the universe,” she gruffed in a muffled voice.

“She’s certainly a temperamental one, isn’t she? Always playing favourites.”

Rose lifted her head and set her chin on his chest. “Any chance you can work some of your hypnotic magic and let me go to sleep for a bit?” She inhaled hard. “I’m so exhausted, and unless I’ve got some help, I’m not sleepin’.”

He lowered his chin to look down at her. “Are you sure?”

“A couple of hours,” she said with a nod. “Enough to give me somethin’ before I have to get the kids ready for school. I can steal in a nap before I pick them up if I have to.”

“I can wrangle the children for you,” he offered. “Get them to school. Give you a good eight or so.”

“You’ve just regenerated,” she answered with a sigh. “Another new good-looking man dropping the kids off, they’ll all start thinking my bedroom’s got a revolving door on it.”

“Since when do you care what that lot think?” he said with an indignant sniff.

“Please, Brax?” She stared up at him with her red-rimmed eyes inflated to the biggest and most pleading state of being possible. “I’ll owe you big.”

“You owe me nothing,” he assured her as he cupped her cheek and concentrated his focus on her eyes. “Sleep,” he said after a short moment. He was quick to drop an arm to hook underneath her knees when her eyes immediately closed, and she collapsed into deep slumber. He lifted her up against his chest with a mild grunt and looked toward where the Doctor still waited in the darkness.

“Come get your mate,” he ordered him. 

The Doctor appeared almost immediately. He held his arms out as he walked, ready to take Rose into his arms. “Thank…”

“Don’t,” Braxiatel interrupted sharply as he handed her across. “The more I hear about Kucail, the more pissed off I’m becoming.”

“If it helps at all in lessening your indignance and disgust at me, I’m in agreement with you,” he said with a light growl of frustration in his tone.

“With just what, exactly?”

“That I’m an infuriating, ignorant, and insufferable woprat,” he answered. He looked to his brother and shook his head. “For a moment I stood in your shoes, Brax. I didn’t like it one bit.”

“Welcome to my entire existence,” he said with a roll in his eyes as his anger fell just slightly to mere annoyance. “Do me a favour and take her into your bed. Hold her till she wakes, make sure her dreams are good ones. The Gods know she needs them these days.”

“Yeah,” he agreed as he pressed a kiss to her hairline and walked toward the stairs. He paused at the bottom and spared a glance back to his brother. “Thank you,” he said with unmistakable sincerity in his voice. “For everything.”

“Didn’t do it for you,” he answered with a shrug as he slipped his hands into his trouser pockets. “But yeah, you’re welcome. Now please. Leave me alone, I’m busy.” 

He turned his back to his brother to walk back toward the computer, which was getting dangerously close to going to sleep and kicking out any unsaved changes from his programming. He caught the rather stunned expression from Narvin waiting in the doorway. The CIA Coordinator held a coffee mug in between two hands that had a noticeable shake in them. His eyes were wide and his jaw was slightly agape.

“Just how many of those have you had?” he asked with a lift in his brow. “Just so you know, there is a limit to how much caffeine you can put in your system before you get overstimulated and jumpy.” He chuckled to himself. “Although, I imagine you having any form of frenetic energy might be an amusing state to see you in, so let me brew another pot.”

“You are the most unempathetic individual I have ever met,” Narvin remarked with an even and almost curious tone in his voice. “In fact, I’ve heard you say on several occasions that you have such marked difficulty in appropriately conveying any form of sympathy toward others that you don’t even bother to try.”

“You have a point, I take it?”

Narvin flicked his eyes to the stairwell, and to the last thud of footfalls as the Doctor made it up to the carpeted second floor. “What I just saw…”

“You did _not_ see anything,” Braxiatel corrected him. “And you will certainly never mention it. Am I understood?”

“If you say so.” He took a sip of his coffee and swallowed noisily. “Though it’s not in my nature to ignore things – particularly things of that nature.” He smirked to one side. “I’m almost impressed.”

“Just to confirm,” Braxiatel muttered somewhat threateningly as he took a seat on the couch. “No regenerations left, right?”

“Why do you ask?” he queried cautiously.

“Asking for a friend…”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Rose circled her arms around the steering wheel of Braxiatel’s Explorer and let out a harried and stressed out exhale against the glassy Ford symbol at its centre. The hypnotic suggestion he’d provided to let her sleep had run a little longer than the couple of hours she’d requested of him. When she had finally roused inside the tight embrace of the Doctor sleeping peacefully and protectively against her back, it was already well into the morning. 

If there was ever an Olympic event in getting two grumpy children out of bed, fast tracking breakfast, getting them dressed and their teeth brushed while trying to make them both lunches, then she’d be up for a medal, no worries at all.

She’d demanded the use of his Explorer over her Escape mainly due to the difference in speed and handling. She was way behind schedule and if she had any hope in hell of getting the kids to their schools on time and couldn’t use the TARDIS to get them there (cursed rules and regulations of using alien technology on Earth), then she needed the sporty beast to do it.

She’d made it with only moments (and surprisingly not a single swear) to spare. 

Now finally alone and able to breathe, she did so in a pant. She counted to ten with each breath in an attempt to calm herself and finally found herself able to smile and relax properly. She did so with a smile and sat back up in the seat and settled in against the soft leather.

She truly loved this car. Big, mean and beautiful, she’d find any excuse to drive it. Now that she had it, she was going to actually drive the damn thing! She looked to the passenger seat at her side and noted that she’d taken the correct handbag on this trip – the one that had her full wallet inside it. There was a mall about an hour outside of central London that she wouldn’t mind visiting. The kids were growing, she needed more clothing for them. Shoes. Winter coats for next season…

…Early baby shopping for Brax and Romana, perhaps.

Oh sweet retail therapy. Yes. That is precisely what she needed right now. Take the beast, escape the Time Lords, and get in some sorely needed shopping. Brilliant. She leaned forward to flick the volume control for the radio and cranked up the breakfast show tunes. She sang along with a bright smile on her face and turned out of the carpark and into the main traffic.

It was on the third song and at least five kilometres away from the school that Rose started to notice that something about the traffic wasn’t quite right. This was a path she’d travelled twice daily for more than two years now without variation to her route. It was a quiet drive for the most part, with the bulk of the morning traffic utilizing the busier thoroughfares. She could pretty confidently state that she knew each and every vehicle, and every single face that appeared in her rearview mirror. This was the school-run route, no self-respecting non-parent driver would voluntarily take themselves into soccer-mum territory.

So what was that shady black car sitting on her tail, swerving and weaving in such perfect time with her own dancing driving that they may as well have been one car. She flicked her eyes to the rearview mirror to try and identify the driver. All she saw was a man in thick black sunshades wearing a … white tunic with a black vest draped over the shoulders.

That was the same tunic and vest set that Narvin wore. That meant this person was very likely either a CIA agent, or a rather clever cosplayer readying for comicon. Either way, she wasn’t going to take a chance. She let out a low curse under her breath and flicked a switch on the steering wheel. 

“How can I help you?” the vehicle asked her in a scratchy and robotic voice.

“Call Brax on his mobile,” she ordered firmly.

“I don’t see any entry for Brax,” the car answered. “Would you like to try your command again?”

She huffed out and slumped in the seat. That’s right, he wasn’t listed as Brax in her phone. It might be his picture that graced the screen when he called, but the name was a little more ring-tone appropriate.

“Call Daddy Cool,” she tried instead. “Mobile.”

“Calling Daddy Cool on mobile,” the car answered dutifully. “Please wait.”

She pulled up to a stop behind another vehicle and drummed her thumbs on the top of the steering wheel in wait for the traffic to start moving again. Her eyes remained on the rearview in a close watch of who was following her. Hopefully it was just one of Narvin’s agents putting a tail on her at Brax’s request.

In a perfect world.

The car connected with Braxiatel’s phone. Rose pursed her lips in a soundless whistle as it rang on his end. She was hardly surprised that he didn’t pick up and that her call went to voicemail. She huffed out with annoyance as he spoke his greeting, then grit her teeth.

“What is the point of having a mobile if you never answer the damn thing, Brax? Like, really? I’m out and about in your car, all by myself with a crazy Time Lord lunatic trying to hunt me down, and you don’t think that…. Ugh. Never mind my usual _you never pick up_ rant. Look, I’m being followed, yeah? Looks like one of Narvin’s guys are playing shadow games with me. Is this something you’ve set…” She ended with a startled yelp and cried out as a large pickup truck suddenly collided with the side of the Explorer. The seatbelt snapped in tight as the force of impact shattered the glass window and threw her sideways in her seat. 

The Explorer spun a full and very violent 360 degrees before it came to a jumping and hissing stop in the middle of the intersection. 

“Brax,” she managed out with a strangled tone as she fought against the deflating airbag. “I – I’ve been hit. I’ve had an accident…” She groaned out long as she felt the pain in her neck, back, and across her chest. “It’s a bad one. I think I might’ve broken your car,” she whimpered out just in time for the message service to warn her that her message was too long and had to be cut off. “And no, I’m not okay.”

She drew in a couple of deep breaths and undid her seatbelt, inhaling deeply now that she wasn’t so constricted by the accident-tightened hold of it. She put her hand on the door release and, although her side of the vehicle was completely crumpled, managed to get the door opened. She slid painfully out of the seat and onto the road. With a stagger and a hold at the dented roof of the car to support herself despite her aching, she looked toward the truck.

“Are …” she gulped against the pain inside her chest. “Are you okay?”

She pushed herself forward with a shove of her hand on the car and staggered with an obviously hindered gait away from where she could smell leaking petrol. “Is everyone okay?”

“Oh, my _Lady_ Rose,” a slightly familiar voice called out with false humour. “We are all very fine, thank you for asking. You, on the other hand…”

Rose stilled and slowly shifted her head toward the voice. Her eyes blinked rapidly at the face of a man she remembered from Phiroi’s capsule; a soldier who had been brought in after being injured in the field of battle. He hadn’t been a pleasant individual, and had made her assistance a living hell with his refusal to be seen to by an _insignificant_ and _disgusting_ species as a _human_.

“Feroiian,” she greeted with a low grunt in her voice. “What are you doing here? I thought you loathed this planet.”

“I do,” he confirmed. “As I do your entire, filthy species.”

“Pleasure to see you too,” she muttered facetiously.

Feroiian looked toward another man dressed in a similar uniform of a white tunic with a floor length black vest draped over his shoulders. “Told you. Get her away from the Cardinal, and she’s an easy capture.” He snapped his fingers. “Secure her and prepare for transportation to Drincons. Notify the King of the Drinconians that we have his prize. He can contact Rassilon for his reward … and then we can get ours.”

She felt a strong set of arms come around her arms and across her chest. She immediately and instinctively struggled for freedom, only to find that there was no chance of escaping the arms of a focused Time Lord.

“Let me go,” she demanded. “I swear to you when Brax and the Doctor find out…”

“By the time they do, you’ll either be dead or in Rassilon’s science lab,” Feroiian corrected with a laugh. “Not really all that effective on the protective front, are they? You were so easy to find.” He snapped his fingers again. “Come on Ehren. The sooner we leave this useless rock, the better.” He looked around himself. “This planet gives me the creeps.”

Back during her time on Gallifrey, Rose had signed on to take a self defence course. She’d begged both Romana and Leela into attending it with her. It was another one of those things to do when her husband was at work and she was left alone to her own devices.

Leela had complained about it at the time, citing that not only did Rose have the Doctor as a protector, but she was always in the presence of her two wolves, who would never let anyone get near her. Romana had agreed and added that she’d offer protection of Chancellery guards if she felt that she was in any danger at all. Being a family member of the sitting president, she could be afforded such protections.

Rose had shaken her head at the both of them. She wanted to know how to defend herself in the rare event she was off by herself. She’d taken those classes with gusto and excelled quite brilliantly at it as well. Romana and Leela had both enjoyed the experience – particularly the drinks they all shared in the Magnolia orchard of Rose’s home afterward. Many times, the three of them ended an evening of self defense classes drunkenly defending themselves against marauding magnolia tree trunks before passing out on the red grasses in front of Rose’s home – only to be discovered by their very amused husbands in the very early hours of the morning.

If she had learned anything from those defense classes, it was that a strike in the nads – as a human might have as part of their arsenal – was not anywhere near as effective. There was, however, a very sensitive nerve cluster located on the left shoulder that could almost always guarantee escape if executed correctly. If she did it right, she could drop this guy on his arse and leg it out of there.

She bit at her lip and increased her breathing somewhat as she planned out the appropriate attack in her mind. The lessons from the rather large and bossy boot-camp-style instructor shifted into her mind as she flicked through the pages to recall what to do when grabbed from behind: Lock your form. Stomp on top of the foot of your attacker with your heel. Dig that heel in – and pray to the gods you’re wearing some form of heels, ladies as that is the most effective footwear in this case – spin on that heel to face your attacker. Grab a firm hold of his left wrist, and slam the very butt of your palm – hard ladies, as hard as you can - into his left shoulder and watch that thug fall. Then no matter what, run!

She watched inside her mind’s eye how they’d practiced that attack and then gave a firm nod to herself. With a deep inhale, she grit her teeth, let out a loud grunt and performed that manoeuvre with such perfection that her boot-camp-instructor would have clapped and growled with pride.

Yes, my Lady Rose! That’s exactly how it’s done. Ladies, you could all learn a thing or two from this vicious little flower.

She scuttled backward with a slight stagger as Ehren staggered and then dropped to his knees with a stunned and disorientated sway. She took the smallest of seconds to self congratulate, then reminded herself that self-congratulations and bragging could come later. Right now, she had to finish up that manoeuvre and leg it the heck out of there.

Oh, she ached and hurt from the accident. There was a long gash that ripped clear down the length of her leg from her hip to her knee, but she couldn’t let that stop her. She spun and she legged it with only the slightest of limps in her stride. She held her teeth in a tight grit and fought against the swimming in her mind from the bump to her head. She ignored the heat of blood running down her calf and into her runners. She ignored the ache in her chest and a potential broken rib from the seatbelt.

What she couldn’t ignore, however, was the sudden and explosive heat that ripped painfully into her shoulder. She couldn’t ignore the way her arm suddenly lost all voluntary movement to hang limp and low at her side. She couldn’t ignore the spreading heat and pain as it exploded across her chest and travelled down into her hips, legs and feet.

“You shot her!” Feroiian shouted out angrily. “That’s a Drinconian weapon, the damage will spread and kill her!” 

She heard him let out a cry of frustration as she felt her entire body give out and she fell to her knees on the road.

“She’s no good to us dead, you blithering idiot!”

Rose fell forward, her face down on the tarmac. She panted out short and hagged breaths as she felt the pain of the weapon surge though her body. She had no way of escaping now, no way of letting the Doctor know where she was, or even to say goodbye to him … or tell him that she loved him, and to please take care of their babies.

“I love you,” she whimpered pathetically to the road, imagining the smiling faces of her husband and children in front of her. “God, I love you.”

The angelic sound of whining and wheezing filled her ears, and Rose dared smile with hope that the Doctor was here.

The panicked yells of the men behind her erased that hope.

“That’s the Presidential capsule,” Feroiian called out worriedly. “Get out of here, for the sake of the Goddess. That’s Rassilon!” 

Rassilon. Oh. _Brilliant_. She supposed right now it didn’t really matter. She could feel the darkness upon her now and the serenity that being so near death gave her. Darkness fell on her, but not before she heard the sound of a creaking capsule door and then the violent exchange of taser fire, followed by the heavy pounding and slip of running feet on the Tarmac toward her…

~~oooOOOooo~~


	37. Home again...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose Tyler wakes up on Gallifrey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What can I say about this chapter except: I have reasons for everything that I do.... I have a plan. Yes I do...
> 
> As for Narvin: Know that I lay blame on Lady Inari for this ... she is the owner of a wicked and magnificent creative mind. I couldn't shake the potential that she whispered into my mind via email yesterday. So I ran with it. My own twist on the new norm in Who and what I believe is a little more likely to happen with it if it were to suddenly happen out of the blue ....
> 
> I'm certainly looking forward to writing the next chapter...... heh ....
> 
> I sinceriously hope you enjoy ... it's a longer chappy than normal..... Lots to read. Sorry about that.

~~oooOOOooo~~

Painful awareness returned to Rose before the darkness had managed to take full hold of her aching body. It came with a piercing, stab of something hot and sharp through her chest plate. The knife, or whatever it was, was thrust into her with such force that she could feel the arms that held it collide hard with her chest either side of it. She gasped out a strangled cry at the sting of it but slumped back to lifelessness on the hard ground almost immediately afterward. She was unable to move or to open her eyes. Even the sounds around her were thick and muffled as though she had stuffed her ears with fluffy cotton balls…

_“Dammit, it’s not enough… what in the name of the Goddess was she hit with?”_

_“Looks like it was a Drinconian weapon blast. Fuck.”_

_“I did_ not _plan for that!”_

_“Got another plan, then?”_

_“Ehm…”_

_“Well think of something and be quick about it. She’s not dying on my watch.”_

_“Nor mine. Look. I’ll keep her as stable as I can with a hit of my own. Get me a stretcher. At least let me make her a little bit comfortable while we transport her back to Gallifrey.”_

_“I’ll notify the medical teams to be on standby for materialisation.”_

_“My surgical team only. Call them in if they’re off. Anyone who doesn’t answer the call to come in is fired.”_

_“Sounds good. I’ll have the President exile them off planet as well while we’re at it.”_

_“Chancellor, if you’re done gossiping over there, I need a little help here if you wouldn’t mind!”_

_“On my way, Coordinator. Keep her alive.”_

_“You say that like I’d actually_ let _her die. Go help round up that lot of degenerates. I’ve got her.”_

There was a hard pressure of a hand pressed down into her chest. She could see hot light through her closed eyelids and felt an intense heat spread across her chest. She could hear the continued sizzling, buzzing sounds of staser fire and scuffling feet in the near distance … and the soft pleading chants of the man leaning over her assuring her she’d be okay and to hold on.

“I’m tryin’,” she drawled inside her mind as darkness took hold again.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Awareness arrived again with the movement of lights over her face. It was a rhythmic pattern of brightness then dim. Flash, flash, flash. Her back and shoulders were pressed into a soft mattress and she could hear the annoying squeak of swivelling caster wheels fighting against an unusual speed of travel. She could only assume she was on a gurney and being hurriedly wheeled somewhere. There was still a hand pressed against her chest, and she could still feel a powerful heat inside her chest.

God, she hurt.

Muffled voices still surrounded her, but she couldn’t make out the owners of any of the voices. All she knew was that they were fighting hard for her survival and that the President was going to be incandescent when they found out what was going on.

_“How is she?”_

_“Unable to support vital respiratory and circulatory systems on her own. I’m running low on my ability to continue to be her life support system. But if I stop, she’ll go into full organ failure within moments. I won’t be able to do anything then. As it is, I can’t even do the prep I need to do to help her now… Rock and a hard place.”_

_“Then let me take over. Go and do what you need to do to help her. I’ve got her.”_

_“Yeah. Thanks.”_

_“Just don’t take too long.”_

_“I’ll do my best.”_

In a brief moment when the heat that was burning into her chest disappeared. The deep breath of relief she wanted to take wouldn’t come, and she felt her face flame into redness and discomfort as her mind registered her being unable to breathe. She wanted to gape her mouth to try and suck in a breath but found herself unable to move.

Another hand pressed down heavily in the centre of her bosom and within a short second she felt the heat of a new flame fire against her chest. Immediately her open mouth gaped in a deep and ragged breath. A full rush of oxygen into her brain, and darkness fell once again.

~~oooOOOooo~~

There were a pair of tender hands on both cheeks when her mind stirred again. Muttered, soft apologies filled her ears as a tight and constrictive vice like device was slipped over her head. Her eyes shot open with an amber swirl as an incredible pain filled her mind and tore across her body. She was sure she screamed, although whether or not it was heard by anyone, she couldn’t be sure. Darkness was welcomed when it enveloped her again.

~~oooOOOooo~~

_“Did it work?”_

_“I really don’t know. I think so, but until she regains consciousness, I can’t say for sure.”_

_“She’s breathing on her own, now and the scan readings seem positive. Everything is within range and all that.”_

_“You say that as though you can actually read and understand the readings and reports, which I know you can’t.” Sniff._ _“But I really don’t know. I mean, well, she’s stable for now. I’ve done what I can to repair the damage her shoulder. By the Gods, that was a mess.”_

_“It took an 18-hour surgery to get it fixed, yeah, I’d say it being a mess is an understatement.”_

_“Good thing I like puzzles, I suppose, to piece that back together” Sigh. “It’s still going to need to be braced for at least a couple of weeks to make sure the bone fragments knit together properly, but she should make a full recovery on that particular injury.”_

_“Anything else? The President’s asking.”_

_“Tell the President …” Gulp. “Tell the President that the current readings are positive. That I believe it was successful. I’ll forward a more comprehensive report when I have time to actually complete it. Gods, what did I have to do to her?”_

_“You’ve never had a problem with this part of her before today. For all intents, it came as a welcome relief to you when it came to light – Stars, it was a relief to all of us. Why is it now that you’re reacting like this; like it’s the worst possible outcome?”_

_“Because until today, I didn’t know that it was me who had to do it to her.”_

_“You’ve done far worse than this before today.”_

_“I really don’t know that I have.”_

_~~oooOOOooo~~_

There was a mild beeping sound in the room, and the hum of an Air conditioner that blew cool air down on top of her lightly clad body. Her mouth was dry and sticky as she slapped her tongue to the roof of her mouth in search of moisture. With a slap of her lips and a dry swallow, she finally felt moisture underneath her tongue. She quickly worked her tongue inside her mouth to fill it with moisture and swallowed a couple of times to spread that moisture down toward the back of her throat.

Her eyes fluttered underneath the bright overhead light and when she tried to lift her arm to cover her eyes, she found it bound and braced across her chest. The slight shift she made to try and free it sent a bolt of pain inside her shoulder, which released a sharp cry from the back of her throat. She sucked that cry back into her throat to bite at the pain with a grit of her teeth.

She maintained the grit of her teeth and hissed out her breaths through them as she fisted the bedsheet with her other hand. It took a long moment for the pain to finally subside, and when it did, she allowed her eyes to open to a slit. Slightly blinded from the light above she blinked rapidly to try and get her vision to cooperate and give her at least a small idea of where she was right now. Obviously, she was in a hospital of sorts, the smell of antiseptic and beeping of monitors gave that away pretty quickly. Just which hospital she was in was another question, of course. Her last real clear memory was that she was in the rather unpleasant company of rogue CIA operatives face-down on a damp London street. The sound of a travel capsule had been one of the last truly coherent sounds she’d heard – that and the panicked cry that it was a Presidential Capsule and that Rassilon was materialising.

Her eyes flashed open wide at that remembrance and she turned her head quickly to one side. Through blurred vision that was slowly drawing into focus, she let her eyes trail over the room in search of something – anything – that could offer her any confirmation of just which hospital she’d ended up in. Was it an Earth medical centre, or was it on Gallifrey? She certainly wasn’t in Phiroi’s capsule, nor the TARDIS. She knew those medbays quite well….

Speaking of the TARDIS, she sent out a plea to the old girl praying for confirmation that she was still on Earth. Please tell her that the Doctor and Braxiatel were able to intercept and sweep her off to safety.

Swirling glyphs drawn in thick black marker on the side of a plastic spray bottle told her that she’d ended up on Gallifrey. She searched for something else, something written in English that could counter her initial observation. Perhaps the Doctor was doodling on things while he was waiting for her to wake up? Not completely out of the realm of possibility, he was prone to scrawling his thoughts on pretty much anything he could get his hands on when inspiration hit. It was why his console monitor was peppered with sticky post-it notes…

She looked to the machinery beside her bed and let out a defeated sigh. The manufacturing markings, and the data reads she could see on the monitors confirmed beyond all doubt that she was in a Gallifreyan hospital. Her heart immediately sank. This meant she was now in the hands of Rassilon. What that meant for her husband and brother in law, she didn’t want to know.

She gave an exploratory movement of her arms and legs in wonder as to whether or not she had been secured on the bed with cuffs and ties. She half expected to be. If Rassilon was waiting for her to wake, she expected he’d have every form of security in place to make sure she had no way of escape. Consider her somewhat pleasantly surprised to find that aside from her left arm being secured by brace across her chest, there was no other form of tie to hold her down.

For the first time in what felt like an eon she allowed herself to smile. 

Foolish Time Lord.

She hitched her breath in deep and prepared herself for the fire and ache that would no doubt come when she dared move. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to find that aside from a lightly swimming head that protested her sudden movement, and the pain in her shoulder, she was otherwise quite okay. She winced as though it might clear her mind and let the tip of her tongue drag across her lip as she looked to the doorway to see if the coast was in any way clear for her to attempt an escape.

She was connected to a couple of rather awkward tubes placed in areas she would never be able to recount to anyone without turning completely red. So with a tug, a pull, and a wince of discomfort at their extractions, she freed herself of those ties and slipped off the bed.

Immediately, her state of attire became apparent. A paper-thin cotton gown big enough only to cover off the front of her. It would be okay if anyone saw her from the front. A rear view would leave nothing at all to the imagination. Not wishing to moon the entire hospital, she made a quick search for something, anything, that could cover off her bottom and provide her with the dignity she’d lost when she was unconscious and tubes needed to be inserted….

Folded on a thick and comfortable looking square leather armchair were the laundered yoga pants and t-shirt she’d been wearing back in London. Her runners were set neatly beside the folded pile. She held back her squeak of excitement and quickly set about putting on the trousers and runners. Her shoulder brace disallowed her putting on a bra and T-shirt, so she made do with the gown covering up that part of her. Creatively, she lifted the bottom of the gown and twisted it around her waist in such a way that it covered up her back and made it less obvious that she was bra-less. She tucked it into the waistband of her trousers to keep it secure, then padded quietly to the door to look into the hallway.

Clear!

Yes! 

She tried to bite her smile, but only managed to scrape her teeth across her lip as it stretched wide with thrill and building excitement. Oh how fun: a scarper through the hospital in search of a transport – or at the very least a phone – so she could get home. She stepped quietly into the hallway and paused when she saw the slow approach of one of the hospital’s doctors. Judging by the thick and quite luscious salt and pepper facial hair on his cheeks and chin, this doctor was obviously male. He was tall and lean and dressed in the Dark yellow labcoat, scarlet scrubs and surgery cap of a doctor from the Prydonian chapter. His black-rimmed glasses balanced low on his nose and his chin was low as he focused on the information held on a glowing tablet in his hand. The other hand was buried deep inside his trouser pocket. He walked without real purpose or urgency, and while his gait was familiar to her, she wasn’t of the mindset to wait around to see if he was the friendly sort or not. Instead, she drew in a deep breath, held it, and bit at her lip to keep herself quiet as she quickly spun to run herself in the opposite direction to him.

She rounded the corner and pressed her back up against the wall to take a very quick peek back at the doctor and the nurse who had quickly jogged to his side with urgency in her posture. Whatever the nurse said to him had the doctor in an immediate state of panic. He dropped the tablet to the ground with a loud clatter, which had Rose pull back and look away from the pair of them. No doubt her curiosity would get her caught, so she’d best scarper while the scarpering was good.

The squeak of the doctor’s shoes on the linoleum flooring as he ran to the room matched perfectly with the squeak of hers as she took off along the corridor. In very short time the light in the corridor shifted from yellow to mauve and an alarm blared loudly throughout the facility.

Rose let out a peppering of both Earth and Gallifreyan swears as she ducked and weaved around trash receptables and cleaning carts. She uttered apologies toward startled patients and cleaning staff as she shot by them, but didn’t slow in her attempt to escape. She needed to separate herself completely from the facility and as quickly as possible. There was no telling just how many security guards they had posted around all ready to make the big grab of the day to haul her up in front of Rassilon.

Each new hallway she fled though quickly flashed from yellow to mauve. The alarms were spreading faster than she could run, and with her still recovering, her ability to maintain such a hurried escape was waning quickly. The pain in her shoulder was on the increase, and in no time at all it would shift to a blinding pain that would probably drop her where she stood. She prayed for her brain to just put up with it a little bit longer, maybe release a bit of Oxytocin, a wash of endorphins, and a hit of Adrenalin to help her along.

While a lovely prospect, her brain wasn’t anteing up any such assistance. She was well and truly on her painful own for this scarper and escape. At some point she’d have to reach the end of it. Despite feeling like it was, there was no way this hospital spread entirely across Gallifrey. It had to have an end at some point.

Please, Sweet TARDIS of Gallifrey let it have an end.

She skidded to a halt when she heard the heavy thunder of multiple boots on tile at either end of the corridor she was running through. There was no connecting corridor or hallway that she’d be able to reach in time. She took a quick look around at the doorways that were spread rather liberally along the corridor and, finding one that had no real distinguishing markings to say the room beyond was occupied in any way, she quickly opened the door and stepped inside. She spun to press her back into the door and closed it with a quiet snick of the lock. She inhaled and exhaled with slow and controlled breaths that held as she heard the thundering footfalls move past the doorway.

“Rose?”

Rose’s eyes flashed open wide at the softly spoken question of her name. She looked deeper into the room, toward a tall and ridiculously beautiful woman standing behind a large ornate wood desk.

Rose’s hand shook as she reached for the door handle. “Who. Who are you?” she asked with a stammer. “I’m warnin’ you, I’m not going to be taken easy. I … I’m not…”

“It’s okay,” she assured with a smile as she held both hands upward in a gesture of surrender. “I’m not trying to take you anywhere. You’re safe with me, I assure you.” She slowly lowered one of her hands to the desk, and a black corded phone on her desk. “Just give me a moment to let them know you’re okay.”

“Let who know?” she demanded hotly as she unlatched the door and prepared to run again. 

“Braxiatel and Thet … ehm .. the Doctor,” she answered. “You’ve given the both of them a scare by running off like you did.” She looked her over. “You’re still not entirely well as is my understanding.”

“Brax and the Doctor? They’re here?” She panted and pressed her back up against the door again to push it shut. “Here on Gallifrey? But Rassilon? What if he finds them?”

“No chance of that, I assure you,” she vowed as she released the guarded hold of her own body and fell into a more relaxed posture. “He was _neutralised_ in the civil uprising almost three centuries ago.” She held up a finger to her as she pressed down on the intercom button on her phone. “Freya, this is Coordinator Narvin. Can you please send an immediate and urgent communication Lords Braxiatel and Sigma to let them know that their escapee is safe and sequestered in my office with me?”

Rose’s eyes widened and she shifted her chest forward to take a closer look at the woman. “N-Narvin?” she asked with genuine surprise. “It’s you? But. But you … you’re a …”

“I’m a what?” she queried with a rise in her brow.

“Oh, err,” she answered after a swallow and a shrug. Should hardly have been surprising to her. She’d witnessed more than one regeneration that switched the gender of the regenerating Time Lord during the Time War. If she recalled correctly, they didn’t enjoy having attention brought to it, so she opted to splutter out something else instead. “You’re gorgeous?”

Narvin looked to her with an expression that was fairly neutral, but her voice was flat. “Spoken as a question, and one I am reluctant to answer lest I appear to be self-centred or self loathing in any way.” She pushed her hair back behind her ear with obvious discomfort. “I’m quite sure your mate and Braxiatel will be here shortly. In the meantime, please take a seat and get off your feet.” She gestured toward a very well-used Nespresso machine. “Coffee?”

Rose’s eyes flicked to the coffee maker and then back to Narvin. She shook her head lightly. “Already pretty wired, thanks.”

“I imagine you are,” she agreed with a light huff in her tone. “There is something to be said about the buzz within one’s entire musculoskeletal structure when the fight or flight instinct rises within. It’s been a long time since I’ve had that rush, myself.”

“Yeah, it’s that alright.” Rose was slow to move as she crossed the floor and gingerly lowered into a chair across the desk. “The crash afterward isn’t all that pleasant.”

“I wish I could remember,” she said with a smile and a lift in her shoulders as she pressed her hands into the desktop and slowly lowered herself into a chair. She did so with fairly little smoothness nor grace, and when she leaned back in her chair there was no polite cross in her legs. She slouched instead with a deep rock back in her chair and a part in her knees that would have Buzzfeed subscribers crying out an accusation of manspreading. The posture was a direct contradiction to the tall façade of pride and royalty that Narvin’s new form projected … and Rose absolutely loved it. She slouched, herself, in as much of a similar manner as she could manage in her current physical condition.

“So?” she began with a purse in her lips as she searched for a potential discussion point to eliminate the uncomfortable silence that would carry them until the Doctor and Brax showed up. “You regenerated?”

“A century or so ago,” Narvin answered as she slipped her hands underneath the long black vest that draped over her knee-length tunic to cradle her hands on her belly. “Small mishap during an operation with Leela.”

“Friendly knife strike, then?”

“I wouldn’t exactly refer to it as being _friendly_ ,” she said with a sigh. “But yes, it was at Leela’s blade.” She held up her hand to ask for pause before Rose commented on that. “In Leela’s defense, the both of us were under the rather potent influence of an airborne hallucinogen. She thought I was someone I wasn’t.”

“Oh,” Rose said with a wince. “I bet she feels awful about that.”

“Surprisingly no,” she admitted. “she considered it a true kill given the circumstances. The fact it ended up being me, well. Not highly relevant in her mind at that time.” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “I suppose it was time to wear a new face. Got to almost a millennium on the old one.”

“Well. I like the new look,” she said with a smile. 

“I’ve been told it’s imperative that I take a compliment with a smile and gratitude,” she said with a one sided smile. “So, thank you. Though I must remark on the fact that when I walk Gallifrey as a male, people are much less likely to make comment on my appearance.”

“Well, I thought you were a bit fit,” she said with a wink.

Narvin offered little more than a neutral expression in reply. Then, after a moment a rather puzzled expression tickled the very corner of his mouth down into a frown. “I really don’t know what that means.” She held up a hand. “And in saying that, don’t mistake me wanting an explanation for it. The more I know about the ways of the humans, the less I know them. You are a very confusing species.”

“Funny, I say the same about Gallifreyans,” Rose countered with a shrug that brought about a wince of pain from her shoulder. “Right. Got to remember that…”

“Or get some adequate pain medication for it,” she suggested. “I’m sure if you ask your mate, he’ll procure you something effective.”

The Doctor’s voice filtered in with slight displeasure from a doorway at the rear of the office. “I already had several prescriptions filled for that very thing.”

Rose lifted her eyes with the full expectation of seeing brown and blue pinstripes, a cleanly shaven face, artfully touselled hair, and the cheeky smile of her husband. Instead she watched a much less cheeky version of him wander toward her. Underneath a dark yellow lab coat, he wore quite fitted scarlet hospital scrubs with red Converse chucks on his feet. He wore a thick but short carpet of lightly greying facial hair across his chin and cheeks. One look at the black rimmed glasses that sat high on the bridge of his nose and Rose winced just slightly. This was the doctor that she ran from in the corridor. He was obviously on his way to check on her. Another five minutes of patience and she’d have known she was safe from harm.

Her eyes followed him as he slowly dropped into a crouch in front her of chair and set hit his hand on her knee. “Hello Doctor,” she said with a smile of apology. 

“I haven’t been called that in a long while,” he said with a forced smile as he leaned to one side to slip his hand into his coat pocket to retrieve a small tubular container filled with medication. “You really should take one of these.”

She chased his eyes with hers and a light movement of her head. “What do you mean you haven’t been called that in a long time? But that’s who you are; the Doctor. _My_ Doctor.”

He lifted his eyes to hers and an expression of adoration crossed his face, instantly making him look years younger. “Oh Rose,” he breathed out appreciatively. “ _My_ beautiful Rose.” He lifted from his crouch just enough that he could lean over her chair and press his mouth to hers in a tender, yet very passionate kiss. He had one hand gripping at the arm of the chair whilst his other cupped her face and then slipped to hold the back of her head to deepen their connection.

Narvin let out a long moan. “I wondered how long it would take for this to start. Congratulations Lord Sigma, you managed a while 73 seconds.” She leaned forward to drop an elbow on the table to hold her forehead in her palm. “What’s the bet this connection will last much longer than that?”

Rose quickly broke off their connection upon hearing her husband called by that name. She sucked in her bottom lip to keep the taste of him on her tongue and smiled up at him. She then looked to Narvin with a pinch in her brow. “Why do you call him that?”

“Call him what?”

“Lord Sigma.”

She looked over her fingers at her. “Because that’s what he’s called. Theta Sigma.”

Rose huffed out a long breath. “Tell me I haven’t ended up in a parallel world or something,” she said with a whine as her hand came up to cover her face. 

“You haven’t,” the Doctor answered with amusement in his voice. “Although I understand how it might seem that way.”

“You do, do you?” She dropped her hand from her face and rolled her head on her neck to try and find comfort with one hand secured up to her neck in a firm sling. “Just how far ahead of me are you right now?”

“A little under three hundred years,” Narvin answered as she leaned back in her chair again with a slouch. 

The Doctor nodded slowly. “And in three hundred years, a lot has changed. For all of us.” He smiled toward Narvin. “Some more than others.”

She whimpered and offered the Doctor an apologetic look. “Which means…” She gulped. “I’m gone, aren’t I?”

The Doctor flicked her a look. For a moment there was an expression of confused question in his eyes, but they quickly widened and a smile spread across his face. “Oh no. No, Rose. Not at all. You are alive. So very much alive.”

“But how?” she asked with genuine confusion. “That’d make me more than 300 years old.” She shook her head. “Humans don’t live that long.”

“On Gallifrey they do,” he answered with a falter in his wide smile. The small falter evaporated quickly to further increase that smile. “Here on Gallifrey, you don’t age. Barring accidents, you could live for millennia. In fact, Leela’s already crossed into her second millennia.” 

“Barring accidents, Rose repeated. “You’ve met me, right?” She gestured toward her current state. “Case in point.”

“You get less jeopardy friendly here on Gallifrey.”

Narvin spat out a laugh at that comment. It was a chesty, raucous laugh that echoed throughout the room. She started to choke and swatted over her desk in search of a drink to quench her throat. “Oh, Sigma. That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in my entire lives. Really it is.”

Braxiatel’s voice muttered in from the same entrance that the Doctor had used to get into the office. “What’s so funny?” He swept his eyes with urgency across the room. His expression softened to relief when he saw Rose being tended to by her husband. “Oh thank the Gods you’re okay.” He looked to Narvin. “Anyway, what’s so amusing to you that I can hear you cackling from the hallway?”

“Him,” she replied with the thrust of both hands across the desk in a gesture toward the Doctor. “Suggesting that Rose is less jeopardy friendly here on Gallifrey than she was on Earth.”

Braxiatel’s laugh began much like Narvin’s did, with a spit through his lips that quickly erupted into a full belly laugh. “Oh, that’s a good one, that is,” he managed out in between laughing breaths. “The only reason you’re not on your eighth or ninth life right now is because you married a Doctor.”

Rose looked slightly confused by that. “Eighth or Ninth what?” she shook her head. “I don’t regenerate, Brax, remember? Not one of you.”

“Yeah,” he drawled long with a questioning look toward his brother. He looked to Narvin. “Looks like we’re safe to step up the schedule a little. You up for a quick jaunt to Earth?”

“Quick for you,” she answered with a tired moan. “I’m there for a bit longer than you are. And violating a vast number of temporal laws in doing do I’ll add.”

“With the permission of your Lady President,” he reminded her.

“Which didn’t help you out much when it was you who violated temporal law, did it?” she countered with a gruff grunt of annoyance. 

“And if I recall, it was you who betrayed the confidence I’d put in you at the time regarding my breaking of laws.” He sniffed with derision. “You were very much part of the push for the punishment I received as a result of that.”

“Which worked out for the best in the end didn’t it?” she answered with a smug smile. “And they say that it’s a woman’s mind that never forgets. Brax, that was centuries ago, and before I could even hope to consider you a friend.”

“Not entirely sure you should be making that consideration right now.”

She pressed her temple into her fist with a slouch and looked toward Rose and the Doctor, who watched the exchange with small smiles. “Would the two of you be entirely upset if I held a staser to his gut and fired off a shot. Just one. That’s all I ask. One life. He’s got plenty of them left.”

“You know that you’re threatening not only a Chancellor of the Supreme High Council, but also the mate of a sitting President,” Braxiatel reminded him. “That’s treason…”

“Not quite,” she answered with a huff. “But I’ll certainly arrest and send myself to Shada if you so desire.” She blew out a breath through pursed lips. “Really, it would be an easier life than chasing after all of you and keeping you in one piece.” She then sat herself up straight. “But. Yes. As it happens I am prepared for the task you’ve set forth. Can’t say it will be all thrills and wonderful times, but such is my life where the four of you are concerned.”

Braxiatel watched Narvin rise from her chair using the knuckles of her fists on the tabletop to support her light lean. “Do you have everything you need?”

“I do,” she answered. “I can give Narvin and Braxiatel the information they require to get things moving on their end to minimise any potential collateral damage when this all blows up. Other than that, not all that much else is required except a time ring to escort myself back here to Gallifrey when I’m done.”

The Doctor rose to a stand himself. Both his hands slipped into his trouser pockets. “I think we should wait a little while longer. I don’t think Rose is quite ready for travel just yet.” 

“She might not be if you were piloting the capsule, Thete,” he muttered with a shrug. “But as I’ll be the one in control, and will be at the helm of Romana’s presidential capsule, I can guarantee a smooth ride free of your usual bucking and pitching method of TARDIS flight.”

His face tightened up slightly. “I don’t want to send her back to the two of us in this condition, Brax. You know full well how the both of us are going to react when we see that.”

“I was there, remember,” he countered. “Don’t you think for a second that the memory of how badly the two of us screwed up isn’t still crystal clear in my mind. How badly I wanted to destroy Rassilon and the entire damn planet for what they did to her.”

“As it is in mine,” he growled out. “And I’d much rather not put any of us through that, thank you. Give her another couple of weeks here on Gallifrey to recover properly and then we can take her home. It won’t do any damage at all to the timeline for us to do that.”

“Mine, too,” Narvin added quietly with a small lift in her finger. “I was there, too, remember.” The finger dropped quick when Braxiatel launched into an angry tirade.

“And sending her home a little later is going to change that, you think? Don’t pretend to me that you’re _that_ monumentally stupid.” He pointed toward Rose with a wave of his hand. “Sending her home tomorrow versus two weeks from now isn’t going to make any difference at all. Why? Because we will find out, and we’ll be the worse for it knowing she had to be holed up here for so long recovering.” He huffed out and lowered his voice to a more calm timbre. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to, Thete. You’re trying really hard to think of all the possible ways we can get to where we are right now without her or any of us having to go through what we did. I don’t blame you. I want the same. So, call me the bearer of bad news if you want, but we have zero choice in the matter. This _has_ to happen in the _way_ it happened in the original timeline. Like it or not, things are going to get hard for all of us. There’s nothing you can do about that.”

“I can think of something,” he seethed in reply. “I just need time.”

“Best you don’t,” Narvin interrupted flatly. “Braxiatel is right. We’ve all been through this over and over again. We’ve done temporal simulations over and over again. Each time, and with each tiny little aberration from the original path of time, we end up worse because of it.” She exhaled apologetically. “I’m sorry, Lord Sigma, but this is the way it has to happen. We’ve done what we can…” She looked to Rose with a weak smile. “Made the necessary fortifications.” She looked back to him. “Now it’s up to them to finish the job.”

“And you have to admit it,” Braxiatel added with a wry smile. “Back then we really were the very best of us. Young guns if you will.”

“I hate guns,” the Doctor muttered with a roll in his eyes.

Rose had listened to the exchange with uncharacteristic silence. It was tempting to jump in and remind them that she/her was standing right here, so how about they talk to her about it, but it was clear that jumping in right now was the exact opposite course of action to take. Watching the vehemence inside Braxiatel and Narvin, however, she knew that the only decision that needed to be made right now was for them to take her home to London and face whatever was to come with all the strength and power she could possibly manage…

…and with her Time Lord family at her side, they’d overcome anything. That she knew without a single doubt.

“Doctor,” she said softly after a shared angry silence between Time Lords. She held her hand out to him. “Come here?”

He lifted his head to the ceiling wanting to draw in a deep breath, and with resignation walked into her arms. He was gentle when he held her against his chest, wary of her injury. He rested his cheek against her hair. “You’re going to side with the two of them, aren’t you?”

“You know I am,” she said softly. “Can’t mess with the timelines, Doctor. Isn’t that what you told me?”

“Easy to say when it’s not you in the crosshairs of Time’s wrath,” he admitted and shifted his head to put his chin atop her head. “Or in the sights of Rassilon.”

“I’m still here,” she offered without the shake in her voice she’d expected herself to have. ‘With you.” She shifted to lift her chin to look up at him. “You and me, right now. We’re still together, yeah? We survived it all, you and me.”

He drew the pads of his thumbs along her cheekbones. “Yeah.”

It was a single syllable word, and not one that was spoken in anything less than a whisper, but that one word was able to convey so very much of his fear and concern for her. She swallowed thickly. “And so the you I’m with now. Me and him, we’ll do what we need to do – together – and we’ll get right _here_ , where you and your me are now. Happy, yeah? Safe and happy”

“Very safe,” he confirmed. “Very happy. And very _very_ much the beat of each other’s hearts.”

She sighed out. There was a pinch of longing in her brows. “That’s incentive enough for me, then.” She rolled up onto her toes and lightly pressed her lips to his.

Immediately, he tilted his head low to one side and deepened the kiss. His mouth opened to cover hers completely. There was a desperate sound of something indecipherable in the back of his throat as he claimed her with a hard and fierce passion of the likes she’d never felt from him before. It curled her toes and drove himself directly into her very soul. It left her panting and dazed when he finally released her and she staggered back just slightly from him unsure of where to walk or even look after a kiss like that.

“My hearts beat for you,” he vowed with the same fierceness that was inside his kiss. “They beat for you now, as they beat for you back then. Don’t forget that. Don’t ever doubt it.”

“If that you ever kisses me like _that_ ,” she said over a dry tongue. “Then I’ll never doubt it ever again.”

He cupped her cheek in his hand and whispered against her ear. It was a series of sensual syllables that send a shudder down her spine with each puff of sound against her ear. He pulled back from her ear and looked down to her with a smile. “Say that to me, and I guarantee you I will.” He winked and his mouth stretched wider. “And I’ll more than likely take it much further than this me ever could with this you.”

“Good to know,” she said with a smile that held her tongue cheekily in between her teeth. He whimpered at the sight of it. “Go home to me right now, and maybe you _can_ take it further…”

“If I wasn’t in the middle of a double shift….”

“And on that delightfully awkward for everyone else in the room note,” Narvin said with a light growl and purr in her voice. “We should get going.” She held her hand to Rose. “I’ll escort you to the capsule dock. I imagine these two need a quick prep talk before we actually head back.” She looked to Braxiatel. “We’ll see you at the Presidential Capsule in no more than ten microspans?”

“About that,” he answered with a shrug. 

“No more than that or I leave without you,” she threatened. She looked to Rose. “Well, come on, then. Best we get the nuclear detonation of Lunbbarrow over and done with, yeah?”

Rose followed behind Narvin, gracing Braxiatel and the Doctor with a small smile and a wave before she disappeared through the door. Braxiatel only have it a further ten seconds before turning to his brother.

“You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“Nope,” he answered. His eyes were still on the doorway where he’d watched the younger version of his wife disappear. “I didn’t.”

“Why on Gallifrey not?”

He let out a breath. “Because she never knew.” He finally took his eyes from the door and shifted them toward his brother. “Right up until it happened, she had no clue at all.”

“Are you sure about that?”

He nodded. “I asked her last night. My Rose, I mean. I asked if I told her about what happened here this week.” He exhaled. “She said she never knew.” He swallowed. “And she told me that I shouldn’t under any circumstances tell her, either.” He snorted a rueful laugh through his nose. “Told me to just add it to the closet of secrets I already keep from her.”

Braxiatel merely huffed. For some reason, he very much doubted that. “If you say so.”

“What you can do, though for me,” he asked as he pulled a thick yellow envelope from his pocket. He handed it toward Braxiatel without actually looking at him. “Is make sure that Phiroi get this. It’s my full medical report on her. Her most recent scans. All of her biological … and telepathic data.” He swallowed. “Someone needs this information, and best it’s him at this juncture.”

He took the envelope and stuffed it into the pocket of his charcoal-coloured blazer. “I’ll see that he gets it.”

The Doctor exhaled a worried breath. “This was the most terrifying time of our lives, Brax. And I’m sending the woman my hearts beat for straight back into the front line of it. I may as well be sending her into the heart of the Time War.”

“Yeah, but remember one thing, Brother. She’s got all of us standing in front and behind her.”

“I know.”

“And by all of us, Thete. I mean _all_ of us.”

A smile formed at the edges of his mouth. It shifted into a stretch that just lightly bared his teeth. “That she does, Brax. That, we _all_ do. Rassilon doesn’t know what he’s up against…”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	38. Feroiian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax, Rose, and the female Narvin return to London, and have to make a quick stop before going home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had Brax and Narvin and a presidential TARDIS. Of course I was going to do something with them!
> 
> Mix of fluff and a bit of stress here as our trio have to drop by and pick up the kids.
> 
> I really really hope that you enjoy this chapter.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Rose wandered around the presidential capsule, caressing its lines and curves with the brush of the tips of her fingers. She exhaled a breath of respect and awe at the powerfully humming time ship.

“Male, or female?” she asked Narvin after a moment.

Narvin lifted her head from the console with a smile. “Full respect to you for asking that question,” she said with a soft smile. “Not too many do. Not even their pilots half the time.”

“Not quite answering my question,” Rose replied with a light chuckle.

“Male,” she answered with a light roll in her eyes that took her back to her focus on inputting the correct temporal coordinates to get Rose home. “Telepathically linked and bonded with Braxiatel’s female craft if you can believe it.”

“Yeah,” she drawled. “I can believe it.” She then frowned a little. “Why isn’t Brax piloting his own ship?”

“She’s at the docks right now with the TARDIS,” she answered with a smirk. “Had a little bit on an incident on Femora-Prime about a month ago that rendered the two ships inoperable.”

“You’re smiling,” Rose noted.

“A little, perhaps.”

“Which means this incident you’re not fully explaining to me was probably very…” She tapered off to look at Narvin with wide and questioning eyes. “Well?”

“Yes. It was rather embarrassing to the both of them,” she confirmed with a light chuckle. “One of the rare moments that picking the both of them up was a pleasure rather than a chore. Assuring them I would say nothing about what occurred ended up rather profitable on my side.” She looked up from the console with a wide smirk as the front door opened and Braxiatel stepped on board carrying what looked to be a brown kraft paper back with thick twisted rope as handles. “Greetings, Chancellor. Welcome aboard.”

Braxiatel froze in place. The miniscule smile he wore upon entry shifted quickly toward a straight line of suspicion. “Right,” he drawled on a long breath as he switched his gaze between the two women. “Uncharacteristic welcome that uses my official title rather than your usual disrespectful monikers.” He pointed a finger between both women. “Whatever the two of you are plotting, don’t even think about it.”

“Not quite plotting,” Rose said with a smirk. “More like having a girl-to-girl chat about the mischiefs of the Lungbarrow lads of my future.”

Narvin coughed. “Can we not ever say that again, please?”

“What part of it?”

“All of it,” she said with a light exhale. She straightened up to her full height with an extremely light backward arch in her spine that may have been intended to puff up the chest, but only managed to push out her breasts instead. “Are we ready to go? Have you finished your last-minute warnings to your brother not to attempt to intervene from here?”

Braxiatel’s face immediately creased into regret. A mild swear left his lips. “I didn’t even think of that,” he groused. “Give me a minute to go make that warning to him, will you?”

“Best you don’t,” Rose offered. “You’ll only end up putting the suggestion in his head and he’ll go ahead with it. Right now, we’re safer with him not thinking of it, yeah?” She pointed to the bag in Braxiatel’s hands. “Did the missus pack you a lunch?”

He looked down with a slight jolt of surprise at the suggestion. The surprise quickly shifted to a shake in his head. “No. Romana did not. This is actually for you.” He held the back toward her. “A change of clothing and fresh underwear as prescribed by your older self. I expect you’ll appreciate the outfit moreso than any I’d select for you.”

“Oh,” she purred out as she skipped toward him and took the bag. She took a quick peek inside. “I love me. So thoughtful.”

“You do have your moments, I suppose,” he answered. He then pointed toward a doorway leading into a corridor beyond the console room. “The flight through the vortex shouldn’t take too long. Go through there, I believe there’s a changing area you can use to freshen up. Once we’ve materialised, we’ll wait until you’re properly dressed before heading out.”

She strode toward the corridor. “We’re making a stop at the school first, yeah?”

“We’re materialising only a few moments after you were ambushed,” Narvin answered. “The children still have a full day of study ahead of them. No need to pick them up.”

Rose turned to face them when she got to the doorway. There was a steel-like expression in her eyes and a light warning dip in her neck to her shoulders. “With rogue CIA agents prowling about? Agents who knew the exact route I take on my school run to be able to track me down in the first place?” She paused to watch both of them slowly fall toward realisation. “So change your coordinates, yeah? We’re picking up the kids, because I’m not putting it past any of them to use Mark and Aly against us.” She turned back to the corridor. “And I promise the both of you, I will hand myself over to Rassilon without a second thought if either one of my babies get caught up in this.”

“If they do, I’ll personally destroy him,” Braxiatel muttered under his breath with darkened threat as he watched Rose disappear though the door. “Neither you nor Thete will even get a look in.” 

“We did bring the children home if I do recall,” Narvin admitted. 

He looked to her. “You’re correct. We did. Right. So, adjust the coordinates to materialise at the school.”

“I’ll have to leave that to you,” she said with a step back from the console. “I don’t know the exact temporal coordinates for the school. I expect you do.”

“Step aside,” he said with a huff as he moved in to correct the fight plan with a deviation toward the school. After a few quick adjustments he flicked the dematerialisation lever and straightened up from his forward lean. “And we’re on our way.” His eyes shifted to the hallway door as Rose dragged herself in still only half dressed. She wore fresh trousers, but still had the green hospital gown draped long down the front of her. In her hand she dragged a shirt and a bra behind her. There was an expression of defeat on her face as she approached Narvin. “Everything okay, Rose?”

She gave him a rather dark look in response then stepped up to Narvin and held her bra and shirt to her. 

Narvin looked at the garments with her brows high up on her forehead. There was clear discomfort in her voice. “Is there a problem?”

“I need help with these,” Rose admitted with a light reddening across her cheeks. “Please?”

Narvin took a rather long stride backward. Her hands shot up in front of her and she shook her head. “Oh. Err. Sorry, Rose. I’m afraid I’m not comfortable with offering that level of support and assistance.”

“Why not?”

Her mouth gaped, flapped, and a sound similar to a whimper was in the back of her throat. “It’s extremely inappropriate, Rose. I’m not close to being qualified to assist you in such a manner.”

“Better qualified at it than he is,” she countered with a gesture toward Braxiatel. She then gestured to Narvin’s chest. “You’ve owned a pair of these for a century now. I’d say you’ve got more than enough practice in putting one of these on by now.” She flicked a look to Braxiatel, who wore a smirk on his face. “Him, not so much. More experience in taking them off than putting one on.”

Narvin shook her head urgently. “Really not comfortable with it, Rose.”

“Oh, come on,” Rose droned pathetically. “You can’t tell me that you haven’t spent more than a few wine-filled evenings with the rest of us girls, doing….”

“Nope,” she coughed out to stop Rose before she could imply anything of that nature. She swallowed thickly. “Just because I am who I am right now, doesn’t mean that I’ve miraculously become one of the _girls_ doing _girl_ things.”

“You can’t seriously tell me that when we saw you in your current incarnation that we didn’t immediately jump to assist you in navigating your way through all your new, er, bits?” She looked to her brother in law. “Brax? Tell me we weren’t that cruel.”

Braxiatel was amused as he walked up to her and held his hand out for the small white garment that was causing the discomfort. “She lasted two weeks with the three of you trying to help her _navigate_ – as you say,” he said with a chuckle. “Before she ran screaming from your house in terror.”

“I’ve not been back since,” she admitted with a hand over her face. “The absolute indignity of it all.”

“Try having a baby,” she said with a sigh as she handed the bra to Braxiatel. “There’s no such thing at all as dignity when you’re naked from the waist down, have your ankles in stirrups and the entire medical staff looking, poking, and prodding down there. Let’s not forget the continued indignity when the lactation specialists walk in and treat your girls like they’re nothing but a pair of milk bags as they pull and yank and push to get the little one to latch for the first time.”

“Please, Rose,” she begged. “No more.”

“Narvin would need a mate to experience anything of that nature,” Braxiatel muttered with a shrug as he stretched the bra open and walked behind her. “No such luck on that front, I’m afraid. Now bend forward if you will.”

Rose did as she was asked and lightly leaned forward. She seemed surprised that Braxiatel seemed to know what he was doing as he carefully shifted the bra across her chest and without looking was able to get it in place well enough. She let out a sound of surprise. “Well, this is something I didn’t quite expect you to know about.”

“If you think this is the first time I’ve ever had to help you into a brassiere, you’re sadly mistaken,” he huffed against her ear as he leaned backward to fasten the hooks at her back. “I have become as specialised in putting them on a female as I am at removing them.”

She straightened up and dipped one arm through a strap and waited patiently as he adjusted the other strap so that it wouldn’t bother her shoulder. “Dare I ask?”

“Best you don’t, really,” he answered with a sigh. “But you do have quite the adventurous side to you that unfortunately doesn’t always end without injury.” He finished the task and petted her lightly on her uninjured shoulder. “Which wouldn’t be too upsetting if you weren’t constantly involving my wife in your adventures. We now have a permanent wing in the hospital for the both of you.”

“Liar,” she muttered as she dipped to step herself into a cute tube-style shirt that she was able to step into like a skirt. “And if you’re not, then it serves you right for leaving the both of us for long enough that we get bored and look for mischief.”

Narvin snorted. “It’s usually when your boredom nosedives like that that the two of them make plans to sire you children. They are gifted at least a double-decade break in your antics when there are children to keep safe.”

Rose gave Braxiatel a light and playful glare. “How very sneaky and patriarchal of you to suppress our adventurous spirits like that.”

“Narvin’s lying and you know it,” he answered with a shake in his head. “You know full well that the procreative successes of our species are controlled by the female. Not by us.” His eyes flicked to Narvin. “Are we here?”

“We have been for quite some time now,” she answered. “Is Rose attired to her satisfaction now?”

“Close enough to it, I suppose,” she answered. “At least I don’t look like the rag queen that escaped the mental wing of a hospital.”

Narvin shrugged as she wandered past toward the doorway. “Never has there been a more apt descriptor of you. You can redress the woman, but you can’t change who she is.”

“Oh,” Rose huffed out with a laugh. “You’re a sassy one, aren’t you?”

“I prefer knowledgeable,” she corrected with a shrug. She curled her hand around the door pull and gave alight tug. “Now, the children.”

Narvin pulled the door open and took a look out into the street lit by an overcast sky. She scanned the area carefully before she dared signal the all clear for Rose and Braxiatel to exit. A low utterance of Gallifrey’s most exulted swear, one not even Braxiatel had the nerve to use, passed through her glossy lips and she dipped her hand underneath her vest to retrieve her staser from a hidden holster.

“Please wait here,” she demanded with little more than a look toward her own shoulder. “Just a moment.”

Rose snapped a glare of anger toward her, but was beaten to question by Braxiatel, who drew his own staser from the back waistband of his trousers and stalked forward. “What have you seen.” He turned and pointed to Rose. “Stay here.”

“Fat chance of that,” she growled.

“Do as your told,” he snapped at her. “And stay here. You’re already hurt, I don’t want it to get worse for you.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” she snapped in reply.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he snarled with a sudden focus on her eyes. He captured her gaze immediately and narrowed his focus. “You will listen to me,” he seethed in warning as he felt her mind succumb to his. “You will stay here, where you’re safe. I will collect the children.”

“As you command,” she responded quietly, a blank look in her eyes.

He kissed her forehead. “I’m not going to bother asking your forgiveness on this one, dear.”

“Doubt you’ll get it,” Narvin offered flatly. “She’s going to be livid with you when she finds out.”

“She won’t remember,” he huffed. “I won’t let her.” He stopped into the doorway. “Tell me what you’ve seen that drew the mother of all curses from you.”

“Feroiian,” she answered. “He got away from us when we intercepted the original group.”

“How did we let one of them escape?”

“The imminent death of your sister,” she answered flatly. “Priorities.”

“Yes, well the priorities have now changed,” he came back with a growl. He held his staser down at his hip with a firm grip around the trigger. “Is he alone, do you think?”

“Clearly no,” Narvin replied with a quiet snap. “He’s got your niece and nephew with him.”

“I mean other agents,” he growled impatiently. “Is it just this idiot I have to worry about, or are there more of them?”

Narvin was less on-guard and trigger ready than Braxiatel was. While she certainly did care for the safety and wellbeing of the children, her lack of familial connection toward them granted her the ease of mind to examine her situation with detachment. She slipped her hands, and her taser, into the pocket of her knee-length tunic and stepped forward into the windy street. She walked tall and without any outward emotion. Her hands remained inside her tunic pockets, which provided the illusion of her walking with her hands cradled in front of her.

“They can smell your fear and anger, Brax,” she warned. “All CIA agents are trained with that sense. Suppress it, or both of those children will be killed.”

He straightened up to walk tall, but there was still a lilt in his shoulders that presented his current emotional state. “You’re asking me to be detached and uncaring toward the children of my brother?”

“I’m telling you to fake it,” she replied. “Be the Lord Cardinal you are and walk tall and emotionless.”

“I’m a chancellor now,” he reminded him.

“You were always better suited to Cardinal,” Narvin said with a sigh. “Less responsibility, but with just as much power and authority. People feared the Cardinal.” she smirked. “The Chancellor, not so much so.”

“I’ll follow your lead then,” he said on a tone that provided Narvin a bow of respect without having to actually stoop forward to perform one. 

“Good,” she said. “Because unlike the fitting of brassiers, _this_ …” She smiled on one side of her mouth. “This is _my_ specialty.” She gave him a very quick look of order. “Mirror, Braxiatel. Mirror me, and we’ll get those children clear of this.” She looked ahead. “And then you can kill him by whatever means you desire. I’ll turn a blind eye to that.”

“Blind eye or not, he will die,” Braxiatel snarled with a curl in his lip. “I truly don’t need your permission.”

“For the Goddess’ sake, Braxiatel,” she said with a huff and a roll in her eye. “I’m being symbolic.”

“It doesn’t suit you, so stop it.”

She led the pair of them to the empty visitor parking lot of the school. A small rise of tarmac that looked level upon a grassy field. Ahead of them, just outside of the school yard fence, a man dressed in the short black and white tunic and trouser set of Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency stood in a relaxed and casual posture. He held a young girl dressed in a pink frilly dress on his hip. Mark, in his grey shorts and button down school uniform shirt stood obediently at his side.

Braxiatel’s shoulders shifted just slightly in warning that he was about to break position to fight for the children, but held firm at a grunt from the woman at his side.

Narvin stood and straight in the eyesight of her rogue agent. Her shoulders were held back and her spine straight; almost at attention. With the light winds gusting breathily at her long, loose dark hair, and wisping to one side the flow of her own tunic, she struck a powerful pose of poise and grace. She kept her hands in her pockets, her delicate hand wrapped around the handle of her staser and inhaled a deep and indignant sniff. A well practiced expression of disdain and disgust seated heavily on her otherwise beautiful face and she made a point to rake her eyes up and down the man in front of her.

“There are very specific laws regarding the use of children as pawns in criminal activities,” she warned firmly. “Laws with very specific, and very harsh, penalties.”

Feroiian snorted. “Who says I’m using children as pawns of any kind?” he asked with a light laugh. “I’m just collecting the children from school on behalf of their mother.” He smirked. “It’s my understanding that she will be unable to perform this task now – or in the future.” He looked to Alirra with feigned apology in his eyes. “Your mama’s not coming home, is she, little human child?”

Mark’s eyes widened with horror. He looked up at Feroiian, and then across the carpark toward his uncle. “Tonza Brax?”

“Don’t you dare move,” Feroiian ordered the young boy. 

“Leave the children out of this” Narvin ordered flatly. “If your words are true, and their mother is either dead or in the hands of Rassilon…” She paused when Braxiatel said her name in warning and silenced him with a suck on her teeth. She lifted her chin again. “Then why do you need the children?”

He flicked open the black vest of his tunic and retrieved a staser from a hidden holster. He smirked as he lifted his arm to aim the weapon toward Braxiatel. “To draw _them_ out,” he answered. “The shamed ex-Cardinal of Prydon and his filthy renegade brother.” He flicked the weapons aim toward Narvin. “You – whoever you are – are just a bonus piece for me to play with.” He raked his eyes up and down her uniform. “My, but, aren’t you a pretty thing? The CIA’s really stepping it up with their female agents these days.”

Narvin shuddered at the leer. “Thank you, but no. I am not interested in the attentions of a child thieving degenerate.” She tightened her fists inside her pockets and took a single stride forward. She stopped when the staser was flicked again in her direction. 

“This needs to end,” Braxiatel snarled through his teeth. “Alirra is terrified, and I won’t have that.”

She hissed for quiet. “I need to know how many of them there are before I grant you the access to do anything close to what you’re thinking of doing.”

“I don’t need your permission.”

“Actually yes, yes you do.” She lifted her chin high once more to look across the tarmac. She strode another step forward and focused tightly on everything that surrounded them. Her mind opened toward the movements of teachers and students in side the building, of the small animals scurrying about scavenging for food, of the birds in the sky and the whistle of wind around trees and buildings. “Release the boy,” she demanded after a moment.

“And why would I do that?” he asked her with a sniff.

She smirked. “Because you operate alone. You don’t have another Time Lord to stand at your back and offer protection and support.” She tilted her head to one side. “You don’t need both children for this. Just one will suffice to obtain your objective.” She forced out a snort. “Wrangling a child is difficult when it’s only the one of them increase that number and you only cause yourself unnecessary lack of focus. Best to concentrate on just one, yes?”

“ _This_ is your plan?” Braxiatel groused through his teeth.

“Oh do shut up.” She snarled in reply. “It’ll be one less for us to worry about as well.”

“One shot,” Braxiatel snarled. “That’s all I need. Just one damn shot.”

“While he’s holding a child. An unpredictable child. She’ll fall and get hurt and you’ll whimper about it for the rest of the day.”

Feroiian’s voice hollered across the short distance. “I’ll release the boy.” He held his finger up in an uh-uh gesture. “But in exchange. I want you up here instead.”

“I’ll do you no good at all,” she called back. “Unlike your rogue self, I’m very much a dedicated member of the Celestial Agency, and very much loyal to our Lord Rassilon.” She tried not to react to the scoff at her side to that claim. She shook her head. “You’ll get no satisfaction from taking me as your hostage. I’ve no mate. I’ve no friends to come for me. I am – quite frankly – nobody.”

“I doubt that very much.” He flicked his chin to the golden band around her upper arm. “You wear a Time Ring,” he called back. “I want it.”

She took it off her arm and held it up in display. “Then take it. Give me both children, and you can take it. Send yourself to the furthest reaches of the universe…”

“I wasn’t loomed yesterday,” he snarled. “That’s a CIA-issued time ring; linked to your bio-data. The only person who can activate it is the lord or lady who’s linked to it.” He flicked his weapon. “Come here.”

“Release the child.”

He shoved at Mark’s back with the side of his firearm. “Good news, Kid. You got a hall pass. Now get out of here, kid.”

“Not without my sister,” he snapped as he stumbled backward on the grass. “She’s my responsibility when we’re at school.”

“One you failed miserably at, didn’t you,” he said with a laugh. “Now get out of here.”

“Not without my sister,” he demanded again with a stomp of his foot. He held up his arms. “Give me my sister!”

Narvin petted the lad’s head as she passed by him. “Don’t you worry about her,” she assured him with a light smile. “Go to your uncle, please.”

“But…”

“Now,” she warned more firmly. “I won’t ask you again.”

Mark blinked at her. he opened his mouth to dare argue, but quickly thought better of it. He slammed his mouth shut and turned tail to run toward Braxiatel. Narvin watched the young boy launch tearily into his uncle’s welcome open arms, and then slowly straightened up to a stand.

“Now,” Feroiian purred behind her. “Let’s see who we have here, then.”

Narvin took a second to lift her eyes to the sky with annoyance. With a light breath, she turned slowly toward her rogue agent. There was no smile on her face, nor was there an appearance of anger. The only expression she held was one of disinterest and neutrality. As her eyes met with Feroiian, she saw the shift in his countenance as her identity dawned with horrific speed in the young agent’s mind.

“C-Coordinator?” he spluttered with obvious fear in his tone. “But that’s impossible…”

“No,” Narvin corrected as she moved to stand at Feroiian’s side to put herself in between Braxiatel’s gun and the small frightened girl. “What’s truly impossible is how a piece of ignorant, immature, filth like you was able to put on a CIA uniform in the first place.” She kept her eyes on Feroiian but turned her head just slightly toward the carpark. “Braxiatel!” she called out firmly. She could have added to that call, to tell him to shoot now, that Alirra was safe, and that she was prepared to take the hit if his aim was off, but she knew she didn’t have to. She barely got to the third syllable of her friend’s name before the how wash of staser fire shot by her ear, singed a large chunk of her hair at her cheek, and finally landed precisely where she knew Braxiatel had put his aim. The small straight line that formed the ribbon-like shot struck Feroiian in the exact centre of his brow.

Narvin’s arms flicked out faster than the lock of hair that fell from her shoulder to catch the young child as the hold on her was released. Alirra dropped into her arms with a moist and wailing thud. She dipped just lightly at her knees to soften her fall.

“Are you alright, little one?” she asked with a look down into Alirra’s little face. “Not hurt?”

Alirra struggled hard to try and throw her arms around her saviour’s neck, but Narvin held her outward, almost at arm’s length. She exhaled a discomforted grunt. “Crying children really aren’t my thing,” she admitted with a turn of her heel in the grass to face Braxiatel. “Best we get you to someone who knows all about this hugging and comfort thing that seems to be so favoured by your species.”

“Oh give her here,” Braxiatel said with a light growl in his voice as he took Alirra in his arms and quickly folded himself around her wailing little body. He cooed to the child and then looked toward Narvin with a frown. “Where _is_ your maternal instinct?”

“Likely in the same location as my instinct to mate in the first place,” she answered. She then flicked her eyes to the child. “This is not something she should remember, Brax. She is too young for experiences like this. To young for those types of nightmares.”

“I know,” he agreed. “I’ll handle her.” He looked to Mark. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

“I will.” Narvin nodded and strode toward the young boy standing silent in in the carpark, clearly distressed. She pursed her lips in an attempt to appear maternal and touched her fingers to his temples as though she was offering him comfort. It took only a second of concentration for the experienced telepath, and she disconnected from his mind, leaving the boy swaying in place with slight disorientation on his face.

“We need to arrange for a pickup of that cretin,” she said without further preamble. “I’ll use my credentials and send a request through Romana’s capsule to have a clearance team to materialise.”

Braxiatel let out a small huff of frustration and followed Narvin back to the capsule. “I’m now wondering if it is worth sticking around a while longer, myself.”

“Would much rather you didn’t,” Narvin replied flatly. “I’m perfectly capable of doing what needs to be done without your infernal interference.” She held the door of the capsule open to allow the trio to step on board. “Now, we should head to the house before we encounter anything else.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

The whimper in Alirra’s voice and the concern in her little eyes broke Rose’s heart. It hadn’t taken her too long to discover that her mother had an injured arm. When she had, her little hands had flown to cover her mouth and tears filled her eyes.

“Will magic kisses from Alirra make your boo-boo better, mummy?”

“Not this time, baby,” she said softly. “This is a big boo-boo.”

“Daddy kisses!” she exclaimed with excitement. “Daddy’s big. He has magic boo-boo power.” She held up her fingertip that she’d cut a week ago on a broken toy. It was clean after a kiss from her father and a quick tap of his sonic to mend the wound. “See? He can kiss away the big boo-boo, right?”

Rose opened her mouth to say that it probably wouldn’t work, but she knew that’d only upset her little girl further. She ended up just giving her a smile and a nod. “Daddy kisses are very magical.” She slapped Braxiatel on the arm with the back of her hand when he grunted and chuckled. “So yes. Maybe he’ll make mummy feel better. How about you go ask him? Hmmm?”

Mark grabbed his sister’s hand. “I’ll take her in, Mum. Distract her with something shiny for a bit, yeah?”

“You’re my little hero,” she assured him with a smile. “Thanks.”

He walked to the door and stopped to offer his uncle a wave. “Good to see you gettin’ old for once, Tonza Brax. Nice to know I won’t be seeing a new face any time soon.”

“Be good you scamp,” he called back with a smirk. He watched the two children exit the capsule and shook his head. “Doctor…”

“He’s the reason that the Doctor doesn’t go by that name in your timeline, right?” Rose asked with a soft voice of question. She walked to the doorway herself, ready to go jump in a shower to wash off the stink of a hospital room. “Because Mark’s taken that mantle now.”

“Thete felt it was for the best. Send him out there with a reputation already in place.” He sniffed deeply. “It doesn’t keep him out of trouble, of course. That boy is far too much like his father.”

“Speaking of his father,” she said softly as she stepped onto the street across from her house. She looked at the home, then looked toward Braxiatel and Narvin as the both of them joined her. “What did he do to me to save my life.”

“Be a doctor,” Braxiatel offered cryptically. “That’s all. Just did his job.” 

“I don’t believe you,” she said on a low voice. “I don’t believe that’s _all_ he had to do at all.”

“You’re alive,” he offered. “And really, isn’t that all that matters? Because it does to me, to him, and to your children.” He cupped her face in his hands and looked down into her eyes. Despite the obviousness that he wasn’t being wholly truthful to her, there was sincerity in his gaze. “Nothing else in the universe matters. Not in this case.”

“Is it something I’ll disapprove of?” she asked with a sigh.

“Not in the slightest,” he answered with a genuine smile of affection. 

“Then do me a favour?” she asked him with a pleading expression on her face as she looked up at him.

“Anything.”

His hands were still on her face when she turned her head to look toward the door. Romana stood just this side of the doorway, dressed in a crimson empire-waisted ankle length dress, she was a vision of grace and royalty. She heard Braxiatel’s voice catch at the sight of her. “Do me a favour and tell her, then.” She looked back to him, noting the completely enamoured way he looked across the road toward his wife. “Tell Romana what you had to do. She doesn’t ever have to tell me. I won’t even ask. But please. Tell her everything.” She caught his eyes when he looked back at her. “Be completely honest with her for once. Do that for me, please?”

He held her lightly and pressed a kiss to her forehead. His lips lingered there for a moment longer than usual. “You’re in my hearts,” he vowed on a whisper. “Know that.”

“Don’t’ change the subject.”

He chuckled against her forehead, then pulled back. “Tell her I need to speak with her. I’ll tell her everything.”

“Promise?”

“I vow on my hearts to you both.”

She lifted up onto her toes to press a quick and surprising kiss to his mouth. She winked when she took a stride back. “I love you, too.”

“We should go,” Narvin warned lightly. “Braxiatel’s ability to remain here without causing a ripple in the timelines is somewhat limited this time around.” She turned and tipped her fingers against her temple in a lazy salute of good bye. “I’ll see you back on Gallifrey shortly. Travel safe.”

“Oh dammit, Narvin,” he said with a growl. “Now that you’ve gone and said that.”

Narvin stretched her smile wide. “You’ll be panicked your entire flight back to Gallifrey. My job is done.” She looked to Rose. “Well? Come on, then. Time to face the ticking nuclear weapons inside your home.”

“Face _them_?” she said with incredulity. “Don’t you think it’s a little more apt that they should fear facing _me_ right now?” She stopped in the doorway to greet Romana. “Morning!”

Romana looked at Rose’s shoulder and her eyes widened with concern. “What happened?”

“Ehm.” She jutted her ear toward where Braxiatel waited in front of what was clearly a presidential capsule. “He wants to talk to you.”

“The future of my husband,” she breathed out with frustration. “Will he ever stop the crossing of his own timelines?” Her eyes shifted to the woman standing with Rose. Initially her posture was one that was stoic, regal, and even somewhat territorial, but it quickly fell into surprise. “Narvin?”

“My Lady President,” she greeted with a light bow of respect in her head.

A grin quickly spread across Romana’s face. She took a firm hold of her skirts to keep it off the floor as she ran. “Oh yes. I definitely wish to hear what my future husband has to say to me.”

Narvin lifted her eyes to the sky. “Of course you do.” She dropped her eyes and looked to Rose with a tired gaze. She held her hand to the door in a respectful manner. “After you.”

They crossed the threshold of the home and into the tight hallway at the door. Rose closed her eyes to feel the ache of her injured arm begin to rise now that she knew she was safe. 

“Are you okay?” Narvin asked her as she dug into her pocket to retrieve the vial of painkillers given to her by Theta Sigma back on Gallifrey. “I expect you might need one or two of these by now?”

She held up a finger. “In a minute. Let me use this to drive me to something first. I need to teach someone a bit of a lesson.”

“What might that be?” Narvin bit at her smile. She knew exactly what she wanted to drive toward. She remembered this bit perfectly. She followed behind Rose, her hands cradled together in front of her, a breathy, soundless whistle on her lips.

Rose held a wince on her face and stalked toward the living room. She got to the couch and coffee table, now littered with not only a laptop, but an array of used coffee cups and dirty plates. Her eyes flicked toward two men, one spread along the length of the couch, and the other slumped in the armchair. Both of them were sound asleep.

Her eyes fell to the face of Braxiatel’s phone, and the notification on it that he had a missed call and a voice message waiting for him. Either he had slept through the call, or he’d been deliberately ignoring it. Whatever it was, she wasn’t letting him get off that easy. She reached her good arm down to grab the phone. She then leaned down and poked at Braxiatel’s chest with it.

“Get up, Brax!” she snapped at him. “Now!”

His eyes shot open and he spluttered a moment. Disorientated somewhat, he gasped and looked around with a dazed expression. “What?” he blurted out hoarsely. “What?” He then looked up at her face, registered her identity, then let out a breath as he ran his palm down his face. He grunted as he flopped back down onto the couch. “Gods, It’s only _you_. What’s wrong, and why can’t Thete help you out with whatever it is? I’m trying to sleep.”

“Oh no you don’t,” she snarled out. She waved the phone at him, being sure to have it poke at his hand to get it off his face. “See this, Brax? See this?”

He swatted at the device and let out a grunt as he covered his eyes with his forearm. “My phone, Rose. Yes. A rather rudimentary communication device designed and built on Earth. What’s so special about it.”

“Obviously nothing,” she snapped as she turned toward the fireplace and hurled the device at the wall. “Considering you never answer the fucking thing!” It splintered and shattered with a loud pop and crash, which drove him up quickly to a seat. In the armchair, Narvin spluttered to his own form of undignified form of waking.

“What the Hell, Rose?” he growled angrily. “Was that entirely necessary?”

“Yes, it was,” she snapped out with her own anger before letting out a long and pained moan as the act of throwing it pulled at her injured arm. “Oh, perhaps that wasn’t a good idea.” She turned to the woman standing behind her. “Yeah, Narvin, I think I’ll take those painkillers now.”

Braxiatel and Narvin’s attention immediately snapped toward the female incarnation of the CIA Coordinator. “Narvin?” Braxiatel ventured cautiously.

“Yes,” she answered flatly. “And I’d rather appreciate it if you’d stop looking at me in that manner.”

“ _What_?” Narvin spluttered from the armchair.

“My question exactly,” Braxiatel said with a low voice of concern and suspicion. His eyes then shifted to Rose and widened to see her heavily braced across one shoulder. His voice fell toward concern. “Rose? What happened?”

“What happened,” Narvin answered bluntly on Rose’s behalf. “Was that you didn’t answer your phone.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	39. Intel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Femme Narvin offers some revelations and assistance in what's to come. Male Narvin is not entirely sure what to make of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm suffering from take-out food poisoning today so this was a real struggle for me to pull together (hoping it reads okay). But I had to do something as we're heading into the weekend.
> 
> So that said... I'm going to haul my nauseous and exhausted butt into a nap on the most comfortable thing I can find... 
> 
> I hope you enjoy. Have a good one!

~~oooOOOooo~~

Braxiatel didn’t shoot up to a stand as he suspected was the expectation of him in this moment. He remained in a light slouch with his eyes on Rose’s heavily braced shoulder as he quickly worked through the accusation he felt he just received from Narvin. 

…A _female_ incarnation of Narvin. An incarnation of him that shouldn’t even exist considering his old friend could no longer produce the enzyme necessary for regeneration. To the best of his knowledge Narvin was only in his second incarnation, and the one previous to now was definitely male.

“Brax,” Rose called out to him with both question and frustration.

He flicked up a finger to her and shot her his own trademarked expression of annoyance and frustration. “One moment,” he ordered out. “Let my head clear, will you?”

Rose dipped her head backward and exhaled a long moan of utter annoyance. “Yes, of course, Brax. Let me give you another few minutes to shake the cobwebs from your head. All the urgent bits have already been taken care of anyway…”

“Don’t,” he bellowed angrily with a glare at her to cut her off. He rose slowly to a stand. His entire form rigid. “Don’t you take that attitude with me. Not now, and not ever, Rose. You don’t ever get to speak to me like that.”

“Yeah,” she corrected him with deliberately exaggerated petulance. A state easy to achieve when the pain inside her shoulder flared and pulsed a steady thump of agony to drive her forward. “I do. I can. I will. And you’ll take it, Brax. This time you’ll bloody take it instead of givin’ it out.” Her face tightened up and she groaned out long. Her voice shifted to pleading. ‘Narvin. I’ll take those painkillers now. Please?”

“Which won’t work at all if you don’t settle yourself down,” she warned as she handed over the small container. “I’m not above ordering Phiroi to sedate you, you know.”

Rose shoved a pair of pills from her palm into her mouth. She held them on her tongue and leaned down to the table to grab a mug half filled with cold coffee on the table. “You don’t have the authority,” she stated around the pills. She then closed her eyes with disgust at the cold milky beverage hitting her tongue to wash down the pills. She made a sound of distaste as she set the mug back on the table. 

“Actually, Rose,” Narvin corrected with a smile. “I have full authority to order it. As per the instructions of his Lord Sigma…”

“Wrong Timeline,” Rose challenged. “Got three hundred years before that can stand up.”

Braxiatel huffed. “Rose does bring up an interesting point.”

Narvin shifted her eyes toward him. There was a certain measure of tiredness in her gaze and it allowed her the perfect expression of complete neutrality. “As one who regularly wades through the soup of his own timeline, I am simply dying to know just what you think is so very interesting about it.”

“Indeed,” Braxiatel muttered. “I see that your change hasn’t diminished your ability to make someone feel as though they are an inch tall…” he held up a hand before Narvin could retort. “Not that it has that effect on me, of course. On others, I will expect it has your desired effect.”

“You have no idea.”

“I expect that I do.” He looked toward Rose, let his eyes fall on the brace over her shoulder, then shifted his gaze back to her. “How long?” he asked gruffly. “How long have you been away and where were you?”

“Eight days,” Narvin answered for her. “Eight very long days for her frantic mate who had to revive his dead wife no less than three times before he was able to get the appropriate permissions for treatment that would stabilise her.”

Rose’s eyes widened. “Eight days? I was there for _that_ long?”

The younger version of Narvin, who had moved to stand beside Braxiatel with very little to no notice from anyone else, exhaled a small sound. “I’m surprised the Doctor asked for permission, let alone waited for it.”

“You don’t know what he had to do,” his elder self answered flatly. “And how many of our temporal laws had to be violated to do it.”

“Again, I can’t see him having the patience to wait.” He looked to Rose. “Not where she’s concerned, anyway.”

“ _She’s_ right here, Narvin.” Rose groused.

Braxiatel uttered a low swear as he raked his hand down his face and let the information percolate a little inside his mind. He wasn’t liking any of this. “What happened?” He looked toward Narvin. “And don’t be gentle about it. I want to know every detail of what occurred.”

There was a sudden thump upstairs, then the pounding footfalls of someone on the run. Everyone in the living room looked toward the stairs as the socked-feet and pinstriped legs of the Doctor rushed down the stairs.

“Here we go,” Narvin said under his breath. It was tempting to take a step backward, but he remained in place beside Braxiatel if only because if any incandescent fury was going to be levered in any direction at all, it would be toward him.

…With that thought, he took a single step to one side to avoid any potential ricochet or side splash of said fury.

“Coward,” Braxiatel said out the side of his mouth toward his friend, knowing beyond all doubt why Narvin had sidestepped as he had.

“I prefer to call it playing the odds.”

The Doctor skidded on his socks along the floor in a slide that almost took him across the complete distance of the archway toward the living room. He staggered back to the centre of the arch with an expression of panic on his half-shaven face. Wearing only his pinstriped trousers topped with thin blue undershirt that hadn’t yet been tucked in, a small towel folded over his shoulder, and a face half covered in white shaving foam, he looked a sight with his wide, manic eyes and expression of fright.

“Aly just told me you were hurt,” he panted out urgently. He caught sight of her arm and his panic shifted to a low form of heated concern. His voice lowered in timbre. “What happened?”

“Car accident,” she answered quickly. “Got T-boned by a truck on the way home from dropping off the kids at school.”

Female Narvin lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Well, it’s not _entirely_ untrue, I suppose.”

The Doctor shot a look toward Narvin, his eyes widened for a short moment with recognition, but he said nothing to her. Instead he looked back at his wife. “A car accident?” he confirmed darkly. At her nod he pulled the towel from his shoulder and dragged it hard down his jaw to clean off the shaving foam that was leaving an annoying tingle from menthol on his skin. Another wipe of the towel, and he flicked the soiled item onto the coffee table. “You left the house only twenty-five minutes ago.”

“That goes in the laundry,” she reminded him with a look at the towel. “Not on my coffee table.”

“Twenty-five minutes, Rose,” he said again. “Unless the NHS has had a rather spectacular upgrade to their emergency service response time, that’s hardly long enough for you to have made it to the closest hospital for treatment and release.” His eyes flicked to the other female in the room. “And definitely doesn’t explain how you’ve ended up here with a future incarnation of Coordinator Narvin standing at your side.” He exhaled. “Which in itself brings forth a host of other questions…”

“Hello to you as well, Lord Sigma,” Narvin replied with definite facetiousness in her voice. “It’s always a pleasure to be in your presence when your mate is not in her finest physical being.”

“ _Doctor_ ,” he corrected with a flare of warning in his eyes. “I don’t care what I call myself in your timeline, here I’m the Doctor. Let’s keep that part of the timeline stable, yeah?”

“No instability to the timelines right now, Doctor,” she slid back with a roll in her eyes. She gestured to the couch and armchair. “If we could all take a moment to calm down a little…”

“I will not,” the Doctor barked out angrily. His eyes flicked to his brother. “What happened, Brax? And don’t leave anything out.”

“I know as little as you do right now,” he admitted with a gruff voice of his own. “Rose has only now returned, and explanations have not yet been provided.”

“And just so we are all clear,” Rose cut in. “None of this is actually my fault, yeah? So gettin’ all snippy with me and not giving me a cuddle when I so clearly want one…” She looked at her husband with a glare in her eye. “Is kind’ve being inconsiderate and misdirecting your anger a bit. And by the way: No, I’m not quite okay, you know, since all of you seem _so_ concerned about _my_ wellbeing here.” She swayed just a little and looked to Narvin. “Woah, these pain meds are something else, yeah? My head’s swimmin’.”

The Doctor winced a little with self chiding and broke the firm stiffness of his posture. He held his arms open and made a sound of soft apology as he lightly circled his arms around her. He held her against his chest with a light embrace and set his chin on top of her head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered out. “I was thoughtless.”

Braxiatel held his hand out to Narvin. “Just what painkillers is she on? Show me.”

Narvin pursed her lips and shook her head. “Not for you to know about, Brax. Just know that they’re the strong sort and cannot be procured at all here on Earth. Lord Sigma was very precise in creating an appropriate dosing schedule for her, the exact nature of which is to be shared with Phiroi only for correct administration.”

Romana swept by the archway with a short pause. She held her hand upward. “I am on my way to speak with him now, Narvin.”

She tossed the container to Romana, who caught it without even glancing at the item being thrown her way. “So you know, Rose took two just now.”

“I’ll let him know,” she sang as she continued toward Phiroi’s capsule. “Thank you, Narvin.”

“Who is Lord Sigma?” Braxiatel asked with a pinch in his eyes.

“ _I_ am,” the Doctor answered. “I suspect in your timeline I’ve got back to calling myself Theta Sigma.”

“About two hundred years ago,” she agreed. “Yes, you did.” 

“And I’m responsible for…” he looked down at the brace on his wife’s arm. “For repairing the damage to her arm?”

“Shoulder,” Narvin corrected. “And yes. There was quite a bit of damage done that required some very intricate surgery on your part. Completely shattered as was my understanding.”

“From a car accident?” he asked suspiciously. “In Brax’s Explorer, that has some of the most impressive safety features on any vehicle?”

“Your car is toast, by the way,” Rose admitted to him with a wince. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s a car,” he answered shortly. “It can be replaced. You, on the other hand, cannot.”

“Soften your voice a little bit when you say that, Brax, and I might just swoon a little, say _Awwww, you really do care about me, don’t you_?”

“You know I care about you very deeply, Rose, so stop being foolish.” 

The younger Narvin, who’s eyes had not left the figure of his elder self in front of him, finally let his eyes wash over each person in the room. First Braxiatel, then the Doctor and Rose , and back to his elder self. “I am going to assume that there are several facets of this incident that haven’t yet been shared with the group. Such as why the need for the intervention of my elder self, an elder Doctor, and I will assume an elder Braxiatel.” His eyes shifted to the hallway. “Judging by the mix of annoyance, frustration, and odd _amusement_ I felt from Romana as she passed a moment ago, I have no doubt that she had audience with the old boy.”

“At very specific request of Rose, yes. Yes she did,’ Narvin answered flatly. 

“And he is not here for what reason?” he pressed. “And don’t give me any nonsense about the crossing of timelines, Narvin. As you stand here before me now, that isn’t an excuse.”

“Braxiatel has other commitments that need to be seen to,” she replied with an expressionless look toward her younger self. “Such as babysitting his younger brother to ensure he does not break the very _very_ few temporal laws that remain unbroken by this affair.” She exhaled hard and looked toward the Doctor. “Retired from your renegade behaviour or not, you are still hard to rein in when the urge strikes.”

The Doctor said nothing, but the flash of anger in his eyes suggested he was on board with whatever his elder self wanted to get up to. Maybe he could take a page from his brother’s book and reach out to see just where he could help make that happen? A quick look toward Braxiatel and it was clear he was thinking the very same thing himself.

The elder Narvin looked between both men. Her face finally opened up to an expression of warning. “And don’t _either_ of you even think about it.”

“Think about what?” Braxiatel challenged darkly.

“You insult me by asking that,” she growled in reply. She strode past Braxiatel, sparing a look toward her younger self, who looked upon her with a clear expression of surprise. “And you. You’re the Coordinator of the CIA, for the Goddess’ sake. School your surprise and curiosity, will you?”

“How?” he asked with a light pinch in his eye. “I don’t have any regenerations left.”

“We have eleven of them left,” she corrected him. “Well. At least you will if you can keep yourself alive for the next century or so.” She took a seat on the couch and pulled the small computerised box and holographic display that Braxiatel had been using toward her. Her face contorted with disgust at the laser lines of the holographic keyboard now displayed over a puddle of spilled coffee. “That is very disgusting.”

She pulled a small thumb drive from her vest and stuck it into a slot at the side of the box. “I’m sure the two of you would have preferred to know this before today, but there is no breach of the CIA network.” Her eyes flicked up to Braxiatel, who now loomed up high over her. She flicked her eyes to the seat beside her in a demand for him to sit but wasn’t surprised that he chose to stand instead. She exhaled with a shake in her head. “The breach you’re looking for is actually within the Presidential Office systems; more specifically from the low-level administration teams. Those responsible for distributing communications from the Capitol.”

“There shouldn’t be a gap in security at all between the presidential and administrative networks,” Braxiatel said with a hard pinch in his brows. “If anything, the nature of the communications coming out of the Capitol have to be held at a higher security level than half the break-out council groups.”

“One would certainly think so,” Narvin said with a shrug in her shoulders.

“One would know so,” Braxiatel affirmed. “Considering I programmed the entire security infrastructure of the Capitol. There should be no way for any part of that network to be breached in any way without shutting down the entire system.” He was clearly annoyed. “The Matrix is to be protected at all costs, Narvin. Our security is as heavily fortified as it is to protect the Matrix.”

“I am quite aware of that, thank you,” she growled in reply as she typed a rapid succession of keys to access her drive. 

“Can it be accessed?” he asked urgently. “The Matrix, is it at risk?”

Narvin’s hands paused for a moment on the table. She drew in a deep breath and resumed typing. “It’s been at risk for quite some time now, Brax. Since Arcadia fell and the main servers were lost.”

Braxiatel shot a glare to Narvin, who stood at the other side of the coffee table. His face had fallen to its typical emotionless façade. “Did you know about this?” he demanded of his friend. “Have you been so ignorant to your duties that you’ve allowed the Matrix to be open to access for anyone?”

“I did not,” he confirmed with a growl and a look through his brows toward Braxiatel. “Had I known, I would have come to you immediately.” His scowl fell back to neutrality and he looked toward the his female self was diligently working on. “The CIA had all responsibility for the data security within the Capitol stripped from them at the end of the war. Rassilon assigned a new team to administer the Matrix and surrounding security programming.”

“No doubt in part because the Lord who was responsible for the security in the first place was exiled in shame for treason,” the Doctor ventured. “The only one who can break the seals you put in place, Brax, is _you_.” 

“I would never,” he growled with a curl of his fist. “My hatred and loathing toward Rassilon is toward him alone. It doesn’t extend to Gallifrey and the knowledge she holds. Even exiled, I will protect Mother Gallifrey with all of my lives if I have to.”

“I know that,” the Doctor snapped. He opened his arm in presentation of those that surrounded him. “All of us know that. But this is Rassilon we’re talking about here – a self deified megalomaniac who elevated himself with a carefully constructed a reputation and legend made from lies, corruption, and betrayal. Of course he’s going to believe that you’d play the same underhanded game he would to get your vengeance. You’re the only Time Lord he truly fears, Brax. The _only_ one. He’s going to lock you out and destroy you as best he can.”

“The fear he has for me is no where near close to what he has for you, Thete,” he corrected quietly. “Don’t underestimate just how much might he feels you have over him.”

“Are you both about done with your mutual admiration societal niceties and false humility?” Narvin said with a grunt as he folded his arms across his chest. “Neither of you are _that_ humble.” He scowled lightly. “Regardless of which one of you makes Rassilon urinate in his robes more readily than the other, the fact remains that there is a breach within the Gallifreyan networks that is allowing the undesirable filth of the universe the means by which to wriggle their slimy way into Gallifreyan business.”

“I agree with Narvin,” his female self breathed out without looking up from the monitor.

“Of course you would,” the Doctor drawled. “You are him, after all.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing,” she replied with a light shake in her head. “ _You_ should know.” She finally did lift her head. “This extends far beyond just a breach in the network. At this part of Gallifrey’s timeline, her people are desperate. There is no economy to speak of right now as the planet tries to recover from war. No commerce, no industry, no agriculture. The few people that remain are hungry, tired, homeless, and without hope while a man like Rassilon leads them toward further destruction with his push for Ultimate Sanction over the Universe.” She swallowed and slowly closed her eyes in remembrance of the dark times in Gallifrey’s timeline. Her eyes opened slowly, and she looked up to her younger self. “You know it, Narvin. You see it every day as you walk the shattered halls and corridors of what was once the mighty Citadel of Gallifrey.”

He closed his eyes and lowered his head. “When people are that desperate,” he added. “They let that desperation be their guide. The weaker members of our species will resort to mild criminal behaviour if only to feed their families.” He blinked open. “The more criminally minded among us will sink to more abhorrent depths and commit treason in order to profit.” He exhaled hard. “It’s not difficult to find like minded partners in times like these.”

Braxiatel looked toward the female Narvin. Clearly, she knew more than her younger self did, so he decided to press her for information rather than the male incarnation of him. “How bad is it?” he asked. “And is any of it at all salvageable? How much risk is Gallifrey under right now?”

“Not as much as it could be,’ she offered. “But if it’s not dealt with quickly, it certainly will be once it becomes known that Gallifrey’s defenses …” She sighed. “Well, that there aren’t any defences left.”

“And Rassilon is just letting this happen?” the Doctor said with a growl. He had an arm still lightly draped around his wife, and was using the tenderness of that hold to keep him from exploding.

“Rassilon really doesn’t care to know that the planet is at as much risk as it is,” she answered. “He’s so focused on his current goals that he’s ignoring the risk entirely.”

“And those goals are?”

She looked up to the Doctor, then flicked her eyes toward Rose. “Her,” she answered simply. Her eyes flicked back to the Doctor. “And you.” She looked at Brax. “The entire Lungbarrow lineage. The three of you – and the children – are all that remain of your bloodline.”

“We’re not important,” Braxiatel countered with a sniff. “Not in the grand scheme of things anyway.”

The younger Narvin shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong.” He lifted his head. “Well. No, not in the grand scheme of the Universe, of course. Frankly, the universe couldn’t give a woprat’s arse about the lot of you wandering about.”

“Doesn’t feel like it at times,” Rose disagreed with a sniff.

“Well, not now at any rate,” he amended. “But to Rassilon.” He actually let out a laugh. “The two of you, Brax and the Doctor, you destroyed any hope he had of elevating the Time Lords like he wanted to. Two very insignificant Lords of Time…”

Romana’s voice growled in from the doorway. “There is nothing insignificant about either of them, Narvin. Watch your words.”

“You know what I mean, Romana.”

“I do not,” she countered sharply. “Throughout Gallifrey’s worst moments, during civil war, virus and plague, and the resurrection on the Imperiatrix, it was Braxiatel that was the only one capable – and brave enough – to do what needed to be done to save our planet. He was the level head who knew what needed to be done when none of us could form a coherent thought between us.” She stood in the doorway, her back straight and her chin held high. Her voice was a sound of power and authority to them all. “The only one with enough courage and honour to Gallifrey that he would sacrifice everything for her – and he did. Many more times than once.”

He spoke her name with worship and gratitude in his tone but said nothing further when she raised her hand to tell him to stop.

“The questionable and illegal methods he uses to do that aside, there is nothing insignificant about Braxiatel, and Rassilon knows this.” She looked toward the Doctor. “And the entire universe knows of the Doctor’s importance in this and all timestreams.”

Female Narvin sorted out derisively. “While I appreciate your honour and reverence toward your mate, Romana…” she paused a moment to think on that, then shook her head. “Actually, no, I don’t. But I will say that it’s unnecessary for this audience and has very little bearing at all on this current circumstance. Should you wish to gush over the brilliance of your mate, might I suggest you leave it for the bedroom where the rest of us don’t have to listen to it?”

“How dare you,” Romana growled with offence.

“No, Romana,” Braxiatel said with a rise and fall of his shoulders. “Narvin’s right, and I agree with her.”

“I don’t believe you’ve ever once agreed with me,” the younger Narvin remarked curiously.

“You’ve never said anything I particularly agree with,” he retorted with a shrug. “Obviously as you age you grow a few additional braincells.”

“Yes. I’m _sure_ that’s the reason.”

“Just what are you implying?”

Female Narvin drew up to a fast stand. Before her younger self could retort, she flicked her hand to swat at the side of his head, then pointed a finger into his face. “Don’t you think for a second I don’t know what you’re thinking, Narvin, and I’m insulted.”

He spluttered, his eyes wide with horror. “Just what do you think you’re doing? You can’t do that? That’s a violation of the laws of time for you to lay hands on me. A simple touch can bring about the reapers.”

“Not when this timeline is on repeat,” she corrected him. “I’ve been here before. This is not in violation of any temporal law.”

“I certainly beg to differ,” he argued. “And if you provide me with a moment, I will pull up the statute and articles that apply to those laws.” He curled a lip. “How did I become like him – “ he thrust an arm toward Braxiatel. “and decide to flaunt against the Laws of Rassilon like they’re nothing but guidelines rather than temporal law?”

“Because they _are_ nothing but guidelines,” she huffed in reply as she took her seat again. “Rassilon’s laws apply to Gallifrey and the movements of the Time Lords, not to time herself. In time you will recognise that.” She blew out a breath. “And it certainly makes the job a lot easier when you do.”

She sat back from the computer with a light push at the box to move it away from her. “Narvin, I’ve uploaded some information that should help in securing the Capitol. Braxiatel is unable to remotely access the necessary databases to work his brand of magical systemwide fortification without tripping about fifty alarms. So, it’s really up to you from here.”

“I’m quite sure I can handle it,” he smoothed out with definite curiosity and interest in his voice. “Non detectable, I will assume?”

“You won’t be caught,” she assured him. “Although there will be warning bells of sorts set off. Fortunately, Braxiatel implemented a few rather interesting roadblocks to deter the sniffer dogs – as they are.”

He flicked his eyes to his old friend. “This is Braxiatel’s work?”

“Of course, it is,” she answered flatly. “Who else does Romana trust with matters that hold such importance?” She smiled just lightly. “It’s about the only thing she can trust him with.”

“Oh, give it a break,” Braxiatel huffed. 

She rubbed her hands on the thighs of her black trousers, then wiped at an itch on her nose with her wrist. “And now that that’s been taken care of. We’ve got much bigger things we need to take care of, and very little time to do it in.”

The Doctor narrowed his eyes at her. “Such as?”

“Such as moving everything you’ve got set up here to another location – and quickly.” She looked up at a clock on the wall with deliberate dramatics. “Because I’ll give the rogues, and quite possibly Rassilon himself, about 36 hours until they descent upon this home.” She looked at Braxiatel. “And destroy everything you’ve spend the last three hundred years of your timeline, the last year of Rose’s, working so hard to put together.”

Everyone stilled at that.

“There are so many things in what you just said that scare me, Narvin,” the Doctor admitted worriedly. “What are you talking about?”

“Where would you like me to begin, Doctor?” she asked with an even look. “Would you like me to start with how almost half of the new CIA recruits Rassilon thrust upon us have gone rouge and are looking to profit from taking your wife to hand her over to Rassilon or any of the other nefarious parties out there looking for the same financial gain. Or how these rogues know exactly how to find her, find your children, and that none of them are afraid to use any of them to get what they want?” she inhaled deeply. “How they’ve already had one almost successful attempt to ambush her…”

The Doctor stiffened. A growl rumbled in the back of his throat. “What did you just say?”

“I think you heard me well enough,” she said calmly. “They’re coming for the lot of you.”

“They won’t get near her,” he growled in reply. “I won’t let them.” He snapped a look toward Braxiatel. “And neither will he.”

She shook her head then looked to Rose. “If that’s the case, then explain to me how she ended up in _that_ condition, Doctor? Where was her protection when she was targeted and shot by a rogue CIA agent carrying an alien weapon so lethal to any species that she died in your arms once on the way to Gallifrey, and twice more before you could finally get her stabilised enough to try and fix the internal damage it caused?”

“Narvin,” Braxiatel warned on a low voice. “There’s no need to be so blunt about it.”

“And how would you like me to pretty it up for you, Brax?” She asked with a hum at the end of her sentence. “The both of you need to know what happened, how it happened, and make damn sure it never happens again. Because if time changes, and Rose ends up in the hands of Rassilon, all of reality goes with her.” She gestured toward the destroyed phone in pieces on the floor. “All you had to do was answer that and you could have immediately materialised your capsule, the TARDIS, and whatever other transports you have here instead of relying on the future of all of us to break the laws of time to do it for you.”

Romana snarled at the Doctor’s side. She could hear the deeply drawn breaths of the angering Lord at her side and knew she had to put a stop to it before the man exploded completely. “Narvin, that’s enough. This is unnecessary.” 

“Is it?”

“It clearly is,” she snapped. “While not an ideal situation, everyone who needed to get out of the situation of this morning got out of it. The timelines are secure and moving as they should. We have information, understanding, and a plan that we didn’t have before this morning.” She sighed. “Yes, Rose may well be in pain and discomfort for the next while, but she is _safe_. You, the Doctor, and Braxiatel saw to that. Safe.” She looked at her with light urgency in her eyes for her to understand. “Safe, Narvin. Without it…”

“She’s not safe,” the Doctor argued hotly. His arm fell from the protective hold he had on Rose. “I lost her,” he growled. “Three times according to Narvin. Three times, Romana. Why? Because I didn’t go with her on the school run today. Because Brax didn’t answer the damn phone when she called. How is that her being _safe_?”

“Tell me she won’t be the safest person in the entire universe from here,” Romana challenged him. “Don’t you understand, Doctor. This morning _had_ to happen. It had to happen because the timelines demanded it. A causal loop that closed this morning that allows us to move forward with greater strides than we’ve taken to now.”

“At what cost, Romana?” he snarled. “Three times,” he repeated on a devastated whisper. “Three times her singular and brilliant heart stopped beating on me.” His eyes filled with terrified tears and his jaw worked light movements as though struggling to form words. Finally, he managed to speak. “ _Three_ times.”

“Rose is still here,” she argued through her teeth. “Right here, Doctor. She is _not_ dead. She’s alive. So much more alive than you know.” She pressed her hands to his hearts and looked up at him. “Focus on that, instead of what could have been.”

“What could have been was her being taken from me,” he growled. “I’ve just gotten her back, Romana. My hearts have barely had time to beat again, and she was almost taken from me.”

“I know, Doctor.”

“No, you really don’t,” he snipped with deliberate attempt to be insulting. “You have no idea at all what it feels like to lose your hearts. To feel the both of them stop inside your chest. I’ve felt it once, and I’m never going through that again. I’m not losing her again.” 

“Doctor,” she warned gently when he turned and stalked toward his TARDIS. He shoved at the door with both hands with enough force that the door slammed up against the inside of the ship. She winced at the bellow of his frustrated cry from inside.

Rose winced and let out a sound of guilt. “I should go see if he’s okay…”

“No,” Romana warned lightly with a touch of her hand on Rose’s arm. “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.” She looked toward her husband. “Brax? Perhaps…”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I’ll handle him.” 

“Do you really think that’s a good idea, Romana,” Narvin asked darkly as he watched Braxiatel stalk angrily toward the TARDIS. “Letting the both of them walk into a fully operational TARDIS in their current state of minds?”

Their heads all flicked toward the TARDIS when her doors slammed shut and the deep thud of the old girl that signalled dematerialisation shook the floor at their feet.

Romana’s face tightened. “I’ll kill the both of them.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	40. To Run or not to Run...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor tries to run ...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couldn't get the chapter to work yesterday, so had to sleep on it... Sorry about no posting yesterday.
> 
> This starts off drama, and ends on a very whimsical fluffy note... It is my hope to get another chapter up today ... we shall see just how successful I am at pulling that one off.
> 
> Anyhoo ... I do hope you enjoy and that the shameless nonsense at the end doesn't irritate you too greatly. I'm in a bit of a flippant mood today... Too much coffee in too little time, me thinks. Time to switch to tea....

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Braxiatel knew exactly what was on his brother’s mind: Pilot this ship to Gallifrey and do whatever it takes to completely destroy Rassilon and eliminate the threat to his family – _I’ve got regenerations at my disposal, and I’ll use every single one of them if I have to._

There was no way he could blame Thete for it. He was of the same mind, himself. It would be easy for the two of them to storm the Capitol and exhaust Rassilon of every single regeneration he had left. Hell, they could both do it with a high-powered staser each and a shot into each of the President’s hearts to take him out with a single pull of the trigger. 

Of course, that would mean that his brother would have to be in any way inclined to use a gun. He wasn’t. He was also opposed to killing anyone for any reason – so just what Thete thought he could accomplish by forming a one-man invasion of the Panopticon, Braxiatel didn’t know. Rassilon wasn’t a man to be reasoned with and reasoning really was the most powerful weapon that Thete had in his arsenal.

Damn fool would just end up getting himself killed while he flapped his gums and demanded Rassilon change his mind and back off.

When Braxiatel crossed into the TARDIS console room, he wasn’t at all surprised to see his brother at the controls angrily entering the galactic coordinates: 10-0-11-0-0/0-2 from Galactic Zero Centre.

“Don’t even think about it,” he growled toward his brother as he watched him lean toward the dematerialisation lever.

The Doctor passed an angry glance toward him, keeping a petulant stare on him as he flicked up the lever despite being ordered against it. “Too late. I’m though with _thinking_ about it.”

Braxiatel looked toward the rotor column as the ship gave its telltale deep thud of warning to dematerialisation. Very quickly he shot forward to slam the lever back down to its neutral, waiting position.

“Well best you _keep_ thinking about it, Thete,” he growled hotly. “Because I’m not letting you run off half cocked like this.”

“ _My_ ship,” he snapped with a shove at his brother’s shoulder to push him away from the controls. “ _My_ decision.” His eyes narrowed as he flipped the lever again. “There’s nothing _half_ cocked about me, Brax. I’m fully cocked…”

“You’re telling me,” Braxiatel snarled as he slammed the lever back downward. “Fully cocked with imbecility thoroughly engaged.” He kept his hand on the lever and swatted angrily at the Doctor’s hand with the other when he tried reaching for it again. “Try to dematerialise one more time, Thete. I dare you.”

“Don’t try and stop me,” he returned with a sneer and fury in his eyes. “It’ll be a mistake...”

“Oh,” he huffed out with a forced laugh and expression of pure amusement lifting his brows. “How adorable that you think I’m in any way threatened by _that_ look.” His expression then hardened quickly. “That intimidating little glint in your eye might work on lesser people, Thete, but I know you better than anyone…”

“You don’t know me anywhere near as well as you think you do.” He lifted darkened eyes to his brother. “You don’t know me at all,” he snarled. “You don’t know what I’m capable of then I’m poked the wrong way.”

Braxiatel shook his head, then faced his brother with a straight and demanding expression in his eyes. “I know perfectly well what you _think_ you’re capable of when you’re tormented, Thete. I also know just what you are _actually_ capable of, which is sorely inadequate for what needs to be done here. So, back off and take a breath before you do something so monumentally unintelligent that you’ll lose everything and every _one_ you care about.”

“Don’t threaten me,” he snarled in reply. “You won’t like who I become when I’m backed into a corner.” He rushed forward to the lever and tried shouldering his brother out of the way. He grunted upon meeting an immovable wall of Time Lord standing between he and his ability to dematerialise. “Now get out of my way.” 

“I’m not letting you dematerialise when you’re in this state, Thete,” he warned with a growl and a shove at his shoulder. 

“I really don’t need your permission. _My_ Ship, _my_ rules, _my_ decision. You don’t like it, then the door’s over there.” He pointed to the front of the console room. “So, get out!”

“Stop acting like a petulant young _loomling_ too immature to know any better,” he snapped in reply. 

“A _loomling_?” the Doctor charged with incredulous indignance. “No, Brax. Not a loomling. I’m a husband and a father who has just had his family threatened – a family I’ve _just_ gotten back after nearly five hundred years apart.”

“And that doesn’t give you permission to act recklessly and without abandon, Thete,” he warned darkly. “Think for once. _Think_!”

“I’ve done enough thinking.” The Doctor curled a furious lip and shoved hard at his brother to try and regain access to his flight controls. “Get out of my way, Brax, or so help me I’ll knock you into a new incarnation.”

“That’s it,” Braxiatel finally snarled. “I’m done with being nice.” He looked upward to speak to the heavens. “Mother, forgive me for this, but he’s left me no choice this time. Father, at least I know you’re good with it.” 

The Doctor’s eyes widened with question and worry but was prevented from making comment as his brother shifted away from the dematerialisation lever, grabbed at his shirt with both hands, then rushed him backward to slam him hard up against one of the orange coral support columns. The shove against the strut was like a punch to his gut that knocked the wind straight out of him. He struggled to draw in a breath and when he did he looked at Braxiatel with fury in his eyes.

“What in the name of Omega do you think you’re doing?” the Doctor barked out with shock. He grabbed at his brother’s hands to pry them from his shirt, but with the flimsy fabric of his thin undershirt clutched tightly in his hands he couldn’t find the right purchase to find freedom. His lip curled in disgust and warning. “Brax, let me go. Don’t make me fight you.”

“Fight me?” Braxiatel said with a laugh. “You don’t have it in you.”

“Want to make a bet on that?”

“Petulant fool,” he growled deeply. He gripped tighter at the thin shirt in his fists to draw him the slight bit closer to that he could speak into his face. “I’m going to say something, Thete, and you are going to damn well going to listen to me for a change.” His eyes flared when the Doctor readied to argue. “Not a word, you hear me? Not a damn word from you. As our parents look down on us, I vow I will drop you if you don’t bite your tongue right now.”

“Say your piece, then,” he drawled with a threatening look in his eye. “Then get out of my TARDIS.”

“Oh, I’ll do that,” he threatened. “I will say my piece and step out of this ship. But I promise you, Thete. I swear upon the tombs of our parents and the crest of Lungbarrow that if I leave this TARDIS and you take off, you will _never_ see your wife and children again.” He hissed through his teeth. “I’ll take them so far out of your reach that you’ll never find them. And you know full well that if I don’t want something found it won’t be.”

“You’re playing a very dangerous game if you want to make that threat.”

Braxiatel snorted. “When your Eighth self was separated from your family, I made a vow to you that I would protect your family. I swore to you that I would make sure they are safe and never alone. I promised you they’d have everything they needed and never have to ask for anything.”

“Yes, and good for you, Brax. Thank you for that. But they don’t need you anymore,” he seethed. “I’m back now. Their safety and having their every need met is now _my_ responsibility.”

“Which you offer them by doing what? By taking off on some hair-brained, boneheaded suicide mission against Rassilon?” He sniffed with disappointment. “Doing exactly what that illiterate halfwit wants you to do? He’s waiting for you; don’t think he’s not. He’s waiting for you with an entire squadron of Chancellery Guards with stasers set to kill.” He drew in a breath and schooled his voice. “Is that what you want? To walk directly into his trap?”

“He threatened my wife,” he snarled in reply. His eyes were narrowed almost to slits, his lip curled and angry. “Just in case you didn’t hear what Narvin said out there, she died. Rose died three times, Brax. _Three_. I almost lost her, _three_ times!”

“But you didn’t,” Braxiatel corrected him with a sneer. “Our elder selves made very sure of that, didn’t they? Rose is alive.”

“She very nearly wasn’t,” he snapped as he renewed his fight for freedom against his brother’s firm and unrelenting hold. “Now let me go, get out of my TARDIS and let me end this threat once and for all.”

“No.”

“I said: get out!”

“Shut _up_!” Braxiatel roared angrily as he slammed the Doctor up against the strut once more. “For once in your lives just shut up!”

The Doctor’s eyes flared wide as he caught his own breath once more, but he kept quiet.

“To confirm for you, I _did_ listen to Narvin.” He confirmed through a curl in his lip. “Unlike you, who seemed only to focus on very specific words, I listened to every word she said. Every word, Thete.” He growled. “Every single terrifying, disgusting, filthy word she said.”

“And tell me, Brax,” the Doctor seethed into his face. “What did you hear that I didn’t, hmmmm?”

“It wasn’t Rassilon who attacked Rose,” he answered with a grunt. “It was a rouge band of agents within the CIA who went after her.”

“ _Because_ of Rassilon,” the Doctor clarified. “Because he wants her. He wants her so there’s a bounty on her head.” He managed to shift his head forward toward his brother. “So. Take Rassilon out of the picture…”

“Finish that thought,” Braxiatel warned. “And you’ll only confirm to me that you’ve lost whatever of your sanity you had left.” He sniffed. “Do you honestly believe for a nanospan that taking Rassilon out will secure her safety?” He lifted his head to the ceiling and then dropped his head low. The fists he held against his brother’s shirt finally opened up to flattened palms, which he laid against the Doctor’s shoulders. “Oh, if it was only that easy. If it was only that damn easy, I’d follow you to Gallifrey and hold him down for you.”

“It _is_ that easy,” the Doctor ventured.

“Is it?” Braxiatel asked tiredly with a lift of his head. His eyes pinched. “Do you really believe for a second that eliminating Rassilon that peace and serenity will descend upon your family once more?” He exhaled a sound that told the Doctor his question was a rhetorical one. “It’s not that simple, Thete. It’s never that simple, and you know it.”

No longer forcibly held in place by his brother, but not fully released, the Doctor drew in a couple of long and deep breaths. It was clear he was fighting every single emotion within himself right now and maintained hold on the angry petulant side to push on. “Then you tell me, Brax. What brilliant and oh so wise piece of advice do you have for your foolish little brother then?”

“I’m not going to advise you,” Braxiatel said on a low voice. “Because your own bullheadedness means you’ll do the exact opposite to what I suggest.”

One side of the Doctor’s mouth lifted in a smirk of agreement. “Maybe you _do_ know me well, after all.”

“I’m really finding myself having to hold back from hitting you,” Braxiatel warned. “Don’t push me.”

“Do it,” he whispered in challenge. There was a narrowing in his eyes as though he expected that Braxiatel would follow through and actually do it. “Go ahead and give me your best shot.”

Braxiatel let out a disgusted breath and gave one last shove before he released the Doctor and took a step back. He adjusted the seat of his waistcoat and shook his head. He lowered the volume of his voice to speak with a more natural cadence. “It’s really not worth the ache in the hand and the grief I’d get from my wife if I did.”

“Coward,” the Doctor challenged him darkly.

Braxiatel looked to his brother with an exhausted expression. “Your wife is beyond those doors,” he said smoothly. “She’s hurt, she’s angry, and she’s _very_ scared. She’s about to lose everything she’s managed to build over these nearly four years.” He looked down as he adjusted the cuffs of his dress shirt. “But, rather than facing her fear and anger. Rather than being at her side and assuring her that she and her children are safe because you’re here to make sure of it. You’re in the TARDIS ready to do a runner.” He looked up at his brother. “You tell _me_ who’s the coward.”

The Doctor blinked at him, swallowed a thick gulp, but said nothing.

“So, you do what you feel you need to do, Thete. Do what you think you have to do.” He straightened his shoulders and back to a proud stature and looked toward his brother with the smallest hint of challenge in his eye. “Just don’t expect any of us to be here when you get back.” 

“I see how it is,” the Doctor gruffed out as he lifted his chin to lean his head against the strut and slouched. He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “No matter what I do, at the end of the day I risk losing them. Let Rassilon continue his games, and I have an entire universe of the most nefarious sorts – including Gallifrey’s Celestial Agency – after my family, and I lose them. Go after Rassilon to end the threat and my own brother takes them from me.”

“Don’t’ give me the _Damned if I do, Damned if I don’t_ speech, Thete,” he growled in reply. His growl shifted to mild arrogance as he once against checked on the state of his cuffs. “Despite that being the motto of any member of the Lungbarrow house, of course.”

Silence took over the console room at that point. The hum of the TARDIS in standby waiting for command was the only sound heard in the room at all. Neither man seemed to want to be the next one to speak. Finally, however, the silence needed to be broken.

“I’m so tired,” the Doctor admitted quietly, his voice barely heard over the hum of the TARDIS.

Braxiatel gave a slow turn to face him. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m tired,” he repeated. “So damn tired of all of it.” He rolled his head to look toward him. “Tired of being Time’s Champion. Tired of being Gallifrey’s little call boy. Tired of always having to be the one who has to lose everything and everyone I hold so dear.” He cupped both hands over his face and dragged them heavily down to his chin. “Tired of running.”

“Then stop,” Braxiatel answered simply.

“How can I?” he asked tiredly. “When it’s all I know how to do.”

“You managed it okay when you were in your Eighth body.”

“Fat lot of good it did me,” he huffed. He let his hands drop from his face and slid them into his pockets. He looked down at his feet and exhaled hard. “Even taking myself out of the race across time and space, I still lost them, didn’t I?”

“Not really,” Braxiatel offered gently. “They were always here waiting for you.” He looked to the door. “And they’re waiting for you now. Out there. But only if you cancel your flight plan and leave this capsule with me.”

“Don’t take them from me,” he asked in a meek voice. “I beg you.”

Braxiatel stilled at the timid sound of his brother’s voice. He couldn’t bring himself to look back at him. “That’s your choice, Thete. Not mine.” He exhaled and lowered his head. He drew in a breath and then exhaled through his nose with a hard snort. “I don’t ever want to have to admit this ever again for the entirety of my lives…”

“Admit what?”

“That I need your help,” he admitted almost too quietly to be heard. “We have 36 hours to secure and move two-hundred and fifty thousand people… Our people … or else they will end up obliterated by whatever force decides to descend upon us.” He winced. “I don’t know that I can manage it without you.”

“That must’ve hurt to admit,” the Doctor said with a small smile gracing his lips.

“You have no idea,” he said with a groan to accent his words. He finally did look at him, and when he did, he wore an expression of defeat. “I don’t even know where to put them.”

“How about the Asteroid that holds the Braxiatel Collection?”

“KS-159?” he asked with a light frown. He seemed to consider it, then shook his head. “It was originally a consideration, but no. We have to assume that Rassilon’s got a close eye on it. My connection to the Collection isn’t exactly a secret.”

“Calling it the Braxiatel Collection might have something to do with that,” the Doctor said with a shrug. He pulled off the strut and rolled his head on his neck as he approached the console. “Brax, your arrogance really is your undoing at times.”

“Like you can talk,” he countered with a light huff. He watched the Doctor walk to the console with a pinch in his eye. “What are you doing?”

“Cancelling the flight plan,” he answered. He moved around the console and shut off several switches that blinked out several lights. “As demanded.” He stopped in front of the keyboard and pulled the monitor around to bring it level to his face. 

“What are you doing now?”

“Taking a page from the Book of Brax,” he answered with a shrug as he tugged the front of his now stretched undershirt.

“Meaning?”

He flicked a look at him and let one side of his mouth lift into a smile. “Reaching out to someone who knows.”

Braxiatel was quick to fall into a marching stride to join him at the monitor. “I see. Do you know what you’re doing, and how to find the best…?”

“Absolutely not,” he answered quickly. “Which is why I’m simply setting up the communications feed to accept your input. I’m leaving the rest to you.”

He looked to the doorway as though expecting his wife to walk in at any moment. “It’s locked, yeah?”

“As soon as I flip the dematerialisation lever, it locks automatically,” he answered with a slip of his hands into his trouser pockets. “Safety feature due to all the rather eager companions who end up on board. I have to very purposefully physically release the door …”

“Good, then don’t,” Braxiatel warned him in a flat voice as his whole demeanour shifted into concentration and his hands flew over the keyboard. “Because if she finds out I’m doing this, and worse, that you’re a party to it.” He blew out a breath. “I’ll be blamed for being a terrible influence, for breaking a promise to her, and all sorts of other misdeeds that I’m probably not quilty of but will take the blame for anyway.” He sighed hard. “I don’t need any of it brought up right now.”

“Another secret to add to the filing cabinet?”

“Oh shut up,” he sniffed. A smile crossed his face as the monitor shifted into static. “Think I found a good timeline to intercept.” He looked toward the Doctor. “Haven’t gone this far ahead yet. Can’t be too sure which one of me will pick up.”

“I’d cross my fingers if I knew you wouldn’t accuse me of being whimsical.”

“I’ll accuse you of it anyway,” he said with a shrug as the static slowly cleared. “So, go ahead if you think it’ll do you any good.”

The Doctor raised his hands with the middle and index fingers crossed on both hands, being sure to show his brother. There was a wide toothy grin on his face.

“Idiot,” Braxiatel muttered with a shake in his head. 

The monitor finally cleared properly, and the curious frown of the Tenth Doctor looked back at them. His face bore a rugged, yet carefully manicured, scruff of lightly greying hair on his cheeks, lip, and chin. His hair, still scruffed into a purposefully styled wild spiked do had greying at the temples. He looked into what must have been a laptop camera on a coffee table, his eyes shifting with curiosity toward his slowly focusing monitor.

“What have we here?” he questioned curiously. His eyes widened and his brows lifted with amusement as a smile spread across his face. “Oh. Hello. It’s _you_!” He lifted his head to speak to someone off elsewhere in the room. “Oi, Brax! Looks like the youngsters found us, better get over here.”

“Which kids?” A set of legs wearing a pair of grey tweed trousers walked into focus. A bottle of expensive Gallifreyan Whiskey and a pair of ice-filled whiskey glasses with at least three fingers of deep amber fluid shifted down over the camera before the man’s face appeared. He looked toward the elder Doctor as he handed him a glass. “Yours or mine, and where are we expected to rescue them from now?” 

“Not any of the offspring.” The elder Doctor gestured toward the monitor with a tip of his glass. “Those two.”

Elder Braxiatel looked into the monitor and let out a short moan as he thought back a moment. “Ehm. I see. So, just where in the timeline are we, then?”

“That’s a good question,” Elder Doctor answered. “Haven’t established that just yet. We’ve got a couple of options to consider, though, don’t we?”

“We do,” he answered as he looked to the bottle of whiskey in his hand, then set it on the table. “Flip a coin?”

Younger Braxiatel let out a gruff sound of annoyance. “The easier – and far less annoying – option would be to just ask us, don’t you think?”

The elder Doctor and Braxiatel looked at each other. Simultaneously, they said the same word. It was spoken with flatness.

“London.”

The elder Braxiatel shifted a slight bit closer to his brother and rested his elbows on his thighs to lean forward in a slouch. “Rose has just been returned to you from her stay on Gallifrey, hasn’t she?”

The elder Doctor’s smile of greeting fell into regret. “I really don’t like to be reminded of that moment in our timeline.” His eyes opened to look toward his younger self. “I’m sorry I sent her home to you in that condition, but time was of the essence, apparently …” he shifted a look sideways. “Despite being time travellers capable of returning her to any place in time we desire, this great lump here insisted on returning our wife before she was truly ready to return.” He looked back at the camera. “But be assured, she will recover and be back to her ever jeopardy friendly self in no time at all.”

“Thank you,” the younger Doctor said with a croak in his voice. “For saving her.”

“You’re welcome,” he said with a shrug. He them pointed toward his camera. “Now just don’t screw it up. Listen to your brother for a change. Trust me when I say he’s fully prepared to act on his threat, so calling his bluff won’t work out in your favour.”

Elder Braxiatel snorted with a laugh. “And right at your moment in the timeline, Romana is in a state of mind that she’d be completely on board with it. In fact…” He lifted his brows and his eyes high. “Right now, I believe she’s mentally exploring any and all available means of torturing the both of us toward a rather slow and painful demise.”

The younger of the two Braxiatels narrowed his eyes and the gap between his brows at that. “I believe you’re mistaken on that. She seems in a rather pleasant mood.”

“After what I just told her?” elder Braxiatel shot back with a snicker. He shook his head and drew back a sip of his whiskey, hissing through his teeth at the burn of the alcohol at the back of his throat as he swallowed. “Pleasant is the exact opposite of what she is right now. Take a closer look at our beloved wife, Brax. Romana is in a somewhat _flippant_ state right now.”

Both of the younger Time Lords eyes widened with alarm and in identical movements, they pushed themselves a full step backward from the console. The fear on their faces was unmistakable.

“More dangerous that outright incandescent, I think you’ll agree,” Elder Braxiatel said with a smirk. He looked to the man seated beside him with a light smirk. “The pride I have in her for being able to draw that reaction out of a man is without end.”

“Even when it’s us?” the elder Doctor asked with his own smirk.

“ _Especially_ when it’s us.” He drew another sip of his whiskey and swallowed with a light growl of appreciation to the spirit. “Fortunately, however, her ire is not wholly directed toward us. Romana is torn between what she wants to do and what she actually _can_ do. So, tread carefully, and do whatever it is she asks of you.” He smiled. “Play your cards right and you can end up here, where we are right now, having a quiet boy’s evening in while the ladies engage in whatever horrific human ritual Rose engaged my wife in this evening.”

“It’s a baby shower,” elder Doctor said with a long-suffering sigh. “To celebrate the imminent birthing of both our children. Hardly horrific.”

“I saw the decorations in my home and the mass-arrival of giggling women before I was rather forcibly exiled to spend the night here with _you_ ,” elder Braxiatel muttered with a wince on his face. “Trust me, it’s horrific – on _all_ fronts.”

“You did get a tray of frosted Magenta cupcakes and those cute little sausage things wrapped in puff pastry out of it, though.”

“Well, I _stole_ those while they weren’t looking,” he admitted with a shrug. “And snaffled a couple of bottles of decent whiskey on my way out as well,” he agreed. “Not bad, I suppose, all things considered.”

The younger Braxiatel let out a grunt of annoyance. “By the hand of Omega, do either of you ever shut up? There is a reason for our contact. We have extreme and urgent priorities right now that doesn’t include listening to the two of you prattle on about cupcakes and little sausages.”

His elder self smirked and waved his glass at the camera. “Sorry, Irving. Should have timed your call a little better. We’re already a bottle in.” He cleared his throat. “What do you need? We’ll do our best to assist.” 

~~oooOOOooo~~


	41. Possible Solution

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team need to figure out how and where to move two hundred and fifty thousand people ...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second chapter today to make up for the lack of one yesterday.
> 
> It's not a particularly long one, but it's a little bit of fun (I hope) ... and yes, it is a light chapter... :)
> 
> I still had two Narvins to play with ... I'm going to have fun with them.

~~oooOOOooo~~

With the thud of the Relative Dimensional Stabilizer signalling imminent dematerialisation, Rose felt her heart sink inside her chest. Part of her felt total agreement with Romana’s threat that she should kill both men, whereas the rest of her simply felt lost and bereft. Was the Doctor really going to run off, now, when she really needed him more than ever?

She lifted her hand to her face to cover her mouth, closing her eyes in a slow blink as she moved toward the couch. With no sound or even an exhale of her breath, she took a seat on the cushion beside the female version of Narvin.

“I wouldn’t be too concerned about the two of them leaving,” she offered quietly, but with little to no emotion in her voice. “They aren’t going anywhere.”

“Are you really sure about that?” Rose asked her with equal quiet in her voice, but with emotion heavily staining her voice. 

“Positive,” she assured her. “While not privileged to know what occurred within the TARDIS walls, I do know that it never dematerialised.”

Romana growled from her place near the ship. “The both of them had better hope that you’re correct, Narvin. I am in no mood for their games right now.”

“Frankly, I’d like to see them leave,” she answered with a small smirk. “If only to witness the both of them receive their comeuppance for a change.” She levered her eyes toward her younger self. “I expect you’ll agree.”

“Much more important matters to concern myself with right now,” he muttered in reply. “Those two idiots are the least of those concerns.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked toward Romana. “I have to admit to some deep concern right now about how you intend on moving these people in such a short time frame. Concerned more about just where you intend on moving them to.”

“A concern I hold as well,” Romana admitted. “There are very few secure planets in the universe that we can consider placing them. Less, when we consider who will actually allow refugees from a planet ruled by a creature ready to destroy them.”

Female Narvin let out a sigh. “Rassilon isn’t seeking to destroy them, per se.” She straightened up in her chair and folded her arms across her chest as she slouched backward into the couch cushions. “However, it is means by which to draw out the Doctor and Braxiatel. The two of them will willingly sacrifice themselves to save their people. Rassilon knows this.”

“I can assure you that if Rassilon thinks he won’t feel the wrath of Gallifrey if he even thinks to threaten these people, then he is sorely mistaken.”

She snorted. “At this juncture, I don’t think he really cares.” She looked to her younger self. “His madness is becoming all encompassing to the old fool, isn’t it?”

Narvin nodded to his older self. He released the tight fold of his arms to let them drop at his sides. “Millennia spent living inside the Matrix, watching the rise and falls of his society, then a resurrection into a body basically unwilling to accept his mind…” He nodded. “It’s to be expected, of course. A lot has changed on Gallifrey since he last wore the sash, and it’s a society that is unwilling to return to the early times where the Time Lords were the only true temporal power.”

Romana huffed. “And we should not be expected to return to those times, Narvin. Gallifrey must grow and evolve…”

“To some degree, yes,” he agreed. “But with small steps, Romana, not the giant strides you forced during your presidency.”

“Do you think this is a good time to do this?” she warned him with a narrowing of her eyes.

“It’s merely an opinion,” he said with a light tilt in his head.

“And one we can discuss at a later date if you wish.”

“Not necessary.”

“I didn’t think so.” She lifted her hands to rake her fingers through her hair and exhaled a long and audible breath of frustration. She kept her hands in her hair, fisting loosely behind her temples. “I don’t know what to do,” she admitted breathily. “How we can be expected to move these people out of sight and mind to those that remain on Gallifrey. _Where_ can we move them to?”

“You’ll work it out in time,” female Narvin responded. She looked to her younger self. “But not before you’ve done a rather large measure of careful reconnaissance with an elder version of Braxiatel first.” She exhaled. “And I will hope that you do have a careful measure of time sense about you so that you don’t screw up the timelines.”

“It might help us somewhat, if you were willing to share the information that you already know about this particular time stream,” Narvin said with a growl in his voice. “Rather than sitting where you are giving only small snippets of cryptic information in a manner both smug and frustrating.”

Romana let her hands fall from her hair. “Quite annoying to be in the presence of a personality like that, isn’t it, Narvin?”

“Oh, you are in a mood, aren’t you?” he shot back.

“Quite,” she growled. “Which should offer you warning enough not to push me right now, don’t you think?”

Rose had been ignoring the exchange for the most part. Her head was clouded and her muscles buzzing in an almost pleasant manner. Focus was involuntary in just where it was aimed, and she’d been staring at the cluttered coffee table for the entire duration of the snipped discussion between Time Lord and Ladies. 

After a moment, she sighed to herself and leaned forward in the seat. “I suppose I should make an effort to clean that up.” Her head tilted to one side as she considered the mechanics that would be required to clean up approximately eight coffee cups, one damp towel, and three dirty plates with more forks than were needed. “Might take a few trips, though.”

Romana looked in her direction. “What are you talking about?” she asked with at least an attempt not to sound exasperated – she wasn’t wholly successful at it, which elicited a warning throat clear from Narvin. 

“Cleaning up,” Rose answered almost distractedly. “I need to clean up the mess, and am just working through the logistics of how to manage it.”

Romana looked toward Narvin at her side. “Well, I would expect that as Coordinator Narvin was party to the mess being made, he should offer you assistance in that task.” She looked toward him. “Don’t you?”

“Braxiatel was more implicit in the mess making than I was,” he countered.

Romana exhaled hard and shot him a glare. “Oh, you are not trying to reassign blame or duty, are you?”

“Fair’s fair, Romana,” he countered with a smirk. The smirk widened as the doors to the Doctor’s TARDIS opened and the two Time Lords stepped out. “Well. This will be interesting…”

Braxiatel snapped the lower hem of his waistcoat downward as he exited ahead of his brother. He offered the male Narvin an expression of impatient question. “What will be interesting?” He didn’t bother waiting for any answer and instead chose to pause in front of his wife. “Romana.”

“I take it you handled him as you said you would.”

“I did, my Dear,” he answered with a light and tentative lean forward to press a kiss against her cheek. “My apology to you if you felt I didn’t have it in hand.”

“You mean have me think you’d both conspired to run?” she queried with her brows lifted high with suspicion.

“It didn’t even enter my mind,” he assured her.

“I wish I could believe you, Brax. But I find myself unable to do so.” She looked over his shoulder toward the Doctor, who remained quietly at the threshold between the hallway and the living room, his eyes on his wife. “Have you adequately calmed down, Doctor?”

“Not in the slightest,” he answered on a low and hoarse whisper without looking away from Rose. The sight of her, normally offering a calming effect on him, was only increasing his anger and hostility. He wanted to go to her, but he didn’t know if he would be able to without running back to his TARDIS to embark on that quick round trip to Gallifrey he’d cancelled. Instead, he shifted his eyes to Romana. “So, it’s best we get to work so that I don’t have to focus on my inability to find calm, yeah?”

“I agree with you, Doctor. But I am at a loss at where to begin,” she admitted to him. “I don’t know just where…”

“We do, my hearts,’ Braxiatel said with a smile. “Don’t you worry about the where. Thete and I have the perfect location in mind.” He frowned just lightly in consideration. “The how of it, well. That’s something we need to work on.”

“And _fast_ ,” the Doctor urged. “I don’t fancy pushing this effort to the very last minute. The earlier we can get away the better.”

Rose’s somewhat vacant voice came in with a sigh. “Logistics, yes. There is a quandary or three, isn’t there?”

Female Narvin leaned toward her and placed her hand on her shoulder. “My, those painkillers are certainly doing a number on your sobriety, aren’t they?”

“Yeah,” she admitted with her wide eyes locked on a single coffee stain on the table. “And I reckon I know how they work, yeah? They don’t actually take away any of the pain. They just get you high enough that you don’t care about it anymore.” She drew in a deep breath. “But. Mind over matter, yeah? Got things to do, children to look after, and coffee table to clear, so I better shake it out.”

Braxiatel let out an apologetic breath. “Oh, Rose dear,” he said with a sigh. “You don’t need to concern yourself with any of that. Let me handle it.” He looked toward the kitchen. “Carein! Some assistance if you will.”

Rose’s head shot upward. “Oh come on, Brax. Don’t get her to clean up your mess.”

“It’s what I pay her for,” he defended. 

“No, you pay her to administer the refugee and soldier admitting teams.”

“And I gave her a raise for additional duties,” he said with a light narrowing in his eyes.

“Should’ve given her one anyway,” she muttered with a fall back into the cushions. She looked toward Narvin seated at her side and smiled widely. “She’s a marvel, that woman.”

“I’ll have to take your word on that,” she answered with a shrug and a smile at the happy sleepy look on Rose’s face. If she was in any way inclined to remark on the adorability of people, she might suggest that the _happy_ _happy_ Rose Tyler was cute. She turned back toward the four-person Time Lord grouping with that light smile on her face. The smile fell when she caught sight of the woman that Rose had been speaking about.

She might have been considered unremarkable to most with her dusty blonde-brown hair fastened back into a loose braid and her plain yet functional style of dress. She wore no make-up to hide the spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks, or to accent her already thick and long black lashes. The reading glasses she wore were far too loose and kept sliding down along the bridge of her nose, and required her to keep pushing them up, which lent the most adorable expressions of light frustration with each press of her finger against the bridge of the glasses...

Adorable. There was that word. One that should not have even belonged within the vocabulary of one Narvinectralonum of the Patrex.

She stood up quickly and rubbed her hands where her tunic met her thighs. There was a very decent attempt at a smile on her face as she extended her hand toward the newcomer. “Hi. Err. Hello. I’m Coordinator Narvin.”

Carein immediately ceased her light conversation with Braxiatel to look toward her. “I’m sorry?”

“Narvin,” she repeated with a step around Rose’s knees to cross between the couch and the coffee table. Her hand was held outward with light awkwardness. Ignoring completely the horrified look on the face of her younger self, she approached the young woman to stand directly in front of her, just slightly inside the acceptable social boundary level between strangers. “My name is Narvin. It. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Carein, is it? Braxiatel speaks very highly of you.”

“Oh?” she answered with a smile of her own and a look toward Braxiatel. “I didn’t think he spoke very highly of anyone.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Braxiatel defended flatly with the intent to expand on that, only to be silenced by Romana grabbing his tie and giving him a glare of warning.

“Let’s see how this plays out,” Romana whispered through her teeth to him. “Shhhhh.”

Narvin either didn’t hear Romana, or she chose to ignore her completely. Instead she stood with her hand still held outward in a request to offer greeting in between them. “Then that speaks of how highly he regards you, then, doesn’t it?”

Carein finally lightly curled her fingers around Narvin’s hand. She gave a slightly embarrassed smile and looked off to one side. “That is very kind of you to say.”

“Would it be too forward of me to remark on how beautiful you are?”

Her younger self exhaled a long and horrified moan. “So incredibly forward, Narvin, you’ve exited the vortex.” 

Carein looked quickly away from the male version of Narvin and reddened deeply. “I really need to assist the Lady Rose in cleaning up. Do excuse me.”

“Let me help,” Narvin offered with an eager smile with a quick lean over the table to pick up several mugs by their handles. “After all, I did contribute to the mess.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Carein said with a thankful smile as she picked up plates and held them to her belly. “I’ll show you where the kitchen is.”

The jaws of the Doctor, Romana, Braxiatel, and Rose hung low and seemed to hold their eyes open wide. Narvin, on the other hand, simply seemed embarrassed. His embarrassment deepened when all sets of wide eyes and japed jaws shifted toward him.

“Not a single word from any of you,” he snarled. “Not one.”

“I’ve got so many more to say than just one,” Braxiatel said with a laugh in the back of his throat. “So many more.”

“I guess she found her instinct to mate,” Rose offered up with a giggle. The giggle ceased quickly at a growl from the man in black and white across the table. “Couldn’t have found a better prospect for a mate, Narvin. Carein is the best of them all.”

“A fleeting fancy,” Narvin assured firmly. “They are three-hundred years out of synch with their timelines. Can’t possibly work.” His arms snapped into a fold across his chest, which he puffed out in front of him. “Now if we can please focus on the here and now, I’d appreciate it.”

“We are focusing on the here and now,” the Doctor offered with a smile as he finally broke position and stepped through Romana and Braxiatel to take a seat beside his wife. “Your elder self is seemingly looking to court the Lady Carein … _now_.” He sighed contentedly when she leaned against him and nestled her head into his shoulder. “How are you feeling, Rose?”

“Snuggly,” she answered him. “So don’t move, yeah. Need a cuddle.”

He leaned forward to hook a hand underneath her knees, then drew her legs up onto the couch to cross over his knees. It provided a much more comfortable cuddling option for the both of them, and he took that opportunity with gusto, wrapping both arms around her shoulders. He spoke over her head toward Narvin.

“Brax and I have determined what should be the safest place to send the refugee and medical capsules. But we’re going to need you to do a little reconnaissance for us first to give us the best temporal coordinates for materialisation.”

That seemed to take Narvin’s attention off the behaviour of his elder self. He dropped the fold of his arms and moved back to the armchair. He dropped into it and slouched in a light lean against the arm rest. “Where might that be?”

Braxiatel answered this question. “Estrail,” he said in a voice that demanded no argument. 

Romana ignored the tone of his voice and inserted her own counter to that suggestion. “Estrail is currently under the grip of the Dogma Virus. I won’t send these people to an area suffering an incurable pandemic.”

“Braxiatel is there with Leela and Andred as we speak,” the Doctor offered. “They have the cure, and a vaccination.”

“Enough for two hundred and fifty thousand people?” Romana queried almost incredulously.

The Doctor shook his head. “Well. No. Not quite.”

“Then my answer is no,” she decided firmly. “I won’t put these people at risk of contracting the illness.”

“Romana,” Braxiatel offered gently. “Do keep in mind that not all of these people are capable of regenerating. Of the entire group, Time Lords make up less than two percent. Most of those who could regenerate and were unable to assist here were sent back to Gallifrey to fight in the war.” He lifted his eyes to the kitchen door. “Even if we didn’t have a handle on the virus itself, we’d stand to lose less than two percent of them.”

“Two percent is still too many,” she said with a huff through her teeth. “I can’t allow this.”

Narvin leaned forward in his chair. “I’m afraid that I have to agree with Braxiatel on this, Romana. We simply don’t have the time to investigate any other options right now. If we wait, we risk running out of time. Who is to say just how many lives will be lost if we don’t move to Estrail?”

“You’re asking me to risk the lives of Time Lords, Narvin,” she warned him. “There aren’t enough of us left to risk the lives of any more.”

“If you stay here and waste time thinking of other options, then you risk the Time Lords _and_ the Gallifreyan refugees.” His eyes flicked toward the doorway. “Innocent women and children, Romana.” His eyes flicked back to hers. “Your people. _Our_ people. The _future_ of Gallifrey. You can’t take that future away from them, _or_ from Gallifrey.”

Braxiatel guided Romana toward the couch and allowed her to sit on the cushion, while he took seat on the arm rest at her side. “Thete and I don’t make this suggestion lightly. We considered the location and the current quandary that exists on the planet surface with the Dogma Virus – a virus currently being dealt with by a future incarnation of myself – one who knows the path we decide to take from here.”

Romana narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t you dare tell me that you’ve been conversing with your future self to get a short-cut, Brax.”

“I don’t wish to lie to you,” he said with a lift in his eyes and a long inhale. He didn’t expand on that further, instead he looked to Narvin. “Are you able to spend some time on Estrail with my elder self. Estimate the safest time for us to materialise our entire encampment?”

“Meanwhile providing Rassilon and the scientific councils with enough interference and non-intelligence that they have no interest at all in the planet?” he asked with a flat expression, but a light glint inside the eye.

“Non-intelligence being your specialty,” Braxiatel said with a one-sided smirk.

“Indeed,” Narvin answered with a long-suffering sigh.

The Doctor lightly shifted his now lightly napping wife on his lap. “Provided you are very careful with how you contact us, Narvin, then you could bounce in and out of the timeline of Estrail over several months to years inside only minutes of our timeline. Braxiatel, Romana, your future self, and I can get the team here ready to mobilise, confirm the travel-worthiness of each of the capsules, and barring any mechanical issues with a capsule can have this house cleared of all Gallifreyan people and technology inside 24 hours.”

Narvin rubbed at his jaw. “In the event of an inactive capsule, we do have many at our disposal on Estrail. Of course, many of them are without a symbiotically linked pilot.” His eyes shifted toward Rose. “Something tells me, however, that’s not going to be much of a problem.”

Braxiatel’s eyes followed Narvin’s. He could feel the question inside his mind. “No,” he agreed. “Not a problem at all, I don’t expect.”

Silence fell for a short moment as all parties considered a decision silently agreed upon by all present. They each considered what their roles in the evacuation might involve, and just how they were going to quickly communicate the evacuation order without panicking each and every one of them.

Narvin finally pushed himself up to a stand with the lightest grunt inside his throat. “Well. We don’t exactly have a lot of time to twiddle our thumbs and convince ourselves this is the right idea…”

“Or the wrong one,” Romana said quietly, doubt and worry for her people still holding firm inside her chest.

“Estrail is a large planet,” the Doctor assured her with a squeeze of her knee. “Our entire party can materialise on the other side to the pandemic if need be.”

“I know,” she admitted with a light nod of her head. “I know this is the right decision, I do. I trust the two of you completely … though the Gods only know why.”

“Because both Thete and I hold Gallifrey’s best interests inside our hearts and our minds,” Braxiatel assured her. “If we weren’t completely sure about this…”

“We wouldn’t suggest it,” the Doctor added. “I vow to you, Romana. Our people…” He lifted his eyes to Narvin. “Our people won’t materialise in Estrail until it is perfectly safe for them to do so.”

“That is my vow to you,” Narvin said with a light nod of his head. “These are my people as well, Doctor.” He drew in a deep breath as he considered his role right now. He had the lion’s share of the job, that was for sure. He twisted the time ring curled around his forearm. “No time like the present, I suppose. I will be in touch, Romana.”

“Good luck,” she said to him as she respectfully rose out of her chair to stand before him. “We are putting our trust in you. Please don’t let us down.”

“I assure you that I won’t,” he said with a one-sided smirk. He looked toward the doorway as his elder self and Carein stepped through the doorway together, the both of them wearing smiles and even laughter as they walked. The quick familiarity shared between them both had him let out a moan and look toward the heavens. “Never meet your future,” he chanted to himself. “Never meet your future…”

There was a slight shift in reality, and very quickly, the pained and somewhat embarrassed Narvin shimmered in and out of existence. 

“Oh?” the remaining Narvin sang out with a smile. “He’s gone, has he?”

“Yes,” Romana droned out with a low and purposeful timbre to her voice. “Which means our work now begins in earnest.” She clapped her hands together and then swatted the shoulders of both the Doctor and Braxiatel. “Well? Come on. We have two hundred and fifty thousand people to move and zero time to movethem in. It’s all hands on deck.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	42. Goodbye Chiswick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Goodbye to the home and life in Chiswick, hello Estrail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a closer chapter. Closing out the time in London for Rose and the family to move them all to Estrail.
> 
> That said, it's a feel-type chapter rather than anything particularly exciting. I'm not awfully good at feels, but I gave it my best.
> 
> Also, Narvin finds a wee stumbling block in her intentions with Carein...
> 
> Tomorrow we move on to different (and hopefully more exciting) things...
> 
> I very much hope you enjoy. (I knicked the penguin bit from The_Plot_Thinens ... I loved it so much, I had to steal it)...

~~oooOOOOooo~~

When Romana had pulled together a mass assembly of the refugee leaders to advise them of an imminent and urgent departure, Rose had expected there to be panic and upset. She was quite surprised to see the news taken with silent and supportive nods and softly spoken offers of assistance.

Rose had borne witness to Romana addressing the masses back when they all resided on Gallifrey. Several times she had been in the wings, and sometimes on stage, due to the familial connection they had. It never ceased to amaze her just how commanding Romana could be. When the former Lady President straightened her back and perfectly projected her most assertive tone of voice, people listened. It was almost like she had each and every person in attendance completely entranced in some kind of hypnotic hold. They’d be willing to put it all on the line to answer her call.

She did pass a look toward Braxiatel just to see if he was in any way responsible for their rapt and unwavering attention of her. He looked just as smitten to her voice and words as the rest of the group. There was a pride within him that projected out of him in a palpable way, and the stern expression he wore challenged any one of them to try and argue. He projected just as much power and authority as his wife – even though he stood a good two feet behind her.

They were beyond all doubt the universe’s most powerful couple: Lady Romanadvoratrelundar and Lord Irving Braxiatel, even without the Presidential sash as a symbol to command such authority.

She was certainly glad to be part of their inner circle and to know them as simply Romana and Brax. Her love for the both of them knew no bounds, and she couldn’t help but swoon just a little with awe…

…Or that could have been the painkillers causing the swoon. Hard to tell at this juncture.

Things had moved with remarkable speed as Romana closed out her address. She was quickly surrounded by a team of capsule mechanics and general labourers willing to pull up their sleeves and help move and secure anything that was coming with them. Romana directed them to Carein, who very quickly and efficiently assigned multiple roles to multiple groups. The young Gallifreyan woman had far more confidence and command than her usually quiet and unassuming character would ever suggest. She rose to any challenge with an unquestionable hard-lined attitude. She wasn’t above raising her voice and demanding full obedience and acquiescence from anyone assigned to her group. People learned pretty quickly that she wasn’t one to be toyed with.

…She was another one of the group that Rose was thrilled to be close to. Carein was kind and tender, but she also had that hard-arsed no nonsense streak to her that Rose was firmly beginning to believe was a standard trait of all Gallifreyans.

Split personalities, all of them.

It amused Rose no end the way Narvin seemed so focused on the young woman. Her eyes watched Carein’s every moment with a sense of growing awe and respect. Beauty and calm was one thing, command and a solid sense of duty was definitely a gilded plus to a soul whose entire life was saturated with the same. More than once, she’d wandered past Rose with an almost dopey smile on her face as Carein loudly called out firm orders and issued corrections where necessary.

“I can understand, now, why Lord Sigma and Braxiatel were so insistent upon me returning to this timeline,” she admitted. “Despite my protests otherwise.”

“She’s amazing, isn’t she?”

“Putting it mildly,” Narvin replied with a smile. “Please tell me that she is not yet mated to another.”

“Plenty of suitors from this group,” Rose answered with a smile. “But she hasn’t accepted any offers.” She pursed her lips to consider that a little more. “Correction, Brax hasn’t accepted any of the requests presented to him for approval for courtship.”

Narvin’s brow flicked upward. “Braxiatel stands as her guardian?”

“He rescued her from a Dalek attack on her village in the Southern Mountains very early on in the war.” She inhaled a deep sigh. “Poor girl lost everything in that attack. Family. Her home. Everything she ever knew, lost with the incessant fire of Dalek rays.”

Narvin’s brows shot high with surprise. “Did he? I have to admit that’s a surprise.”

“Not really,” she corrected softly with a smile on her face. “There’s a side to him that none of you ever see. Despite wanting to come across as a militant hard-arse with a giant rod up his arse, Brax really does care. He won’t leave anyone behind if they need help.” She smiled. “And Carein needed his help.”

Narvin exhaled a deeply disappointed sigh. “This means I have to seek Braxiatel’s permission for courtship, doesn’t it?”

“And he doesn’t seem to like you all that much,” Rose noted with a light tease.

“A rather gross understatement,” she agreed with a slouch in her shoulders.

“If you promise me that your intentions are more than just a bit of one-time slap and tickle…”

“I’m sorry?” she barked out with shock and disgust. “Slap and _what_? _Tickle_?” She swallowed thickly and with a pained and offended expression on her face. “I don’t know that I’ve ever been so thoroughly insulted before now. That is quite a disgusting accusation to make.”

Rose merely gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I’m pretty sure you’ve heard worse than that levered in your direction before now,” she said with a light huff in her voice. “Considerin’ your job and all that.”

“Which should be an adequate indicator of just how disgusted I am by your comment.” She sniffed and turned up her nose. “Humans, _really_. My dealings with your people very rarely move positively.”

Rose exhaled hard and slouched her shoulders downward as far as her injury would allow. “Puttin’ me in the same class as the lowlifes you deal with on a daily basis really isn’t going to help you much in securing my help with Brax, you know.”

Braxiatel’s voice piped up curiously from behind them. “And just what kind of help is the Coordinator looking to secure from you, dear?” He touched his hand to her lower back. “And how is the shoulder?”

Rose gave Narvin a narrowed look before looking toward Braxiatel with a wide smile. “Narvin’s not getting’ any help from me on anythin’, so no need for you to waste your time by asking.” She lifted her chin with forced petulance. “Apparently I’m more insulting to her than any of the criminal-likes she deals with…”

Narvin merely rolled her eyes and let out a hard sigh of annoyance.

Braxiatel smiled widely. “Well, if that’s the case, and you’ve been able to somehow insult Narvin that greatly, allow me to say just how so very proud I am of you right now.” He pressed a kiss on her temple. “We’re finalising the tear down now, Rose. Can you please advise the teams of what you want put in Thete’s TARDIS to take with you?”

“Do I really have to leave?”

“For right now, I’m afraid so.”

Rose levered a glare at Narvin before looking up to Braxiatel with the most innocent expression of pleading she could muster. “Can I bring Carein with me? With her at my side, I’m sure we’ll move nice and quick.” 

“That’s a very good point,” he agreed with a rub at his chin. “Everything out here looks well in hand.” He snapped his fingers forward. “Carein, my dear. Can I ask you to assist Rose with a couple of tasks? The movers upstairs need some proper guidance.”

“Of course, Cardinal,” she replied with a light leap over a rolled up mat in the hallway. She met Rose in the hallway with only a small glance and smile toward Narvin. “How can I help you?” Her brows pinched at the brace on her shoulder. “Oh, Rose. Elistra told me what happened to you. Are you okay?”

Rose wrapped her arm around Carein’s and the two women shared a light friendly smile to each other before Rose levered a glare toward a rather exasperated Narvin. “You and I have so much to talk about, Care, honey. Let’s head upstairs.”

“Rose,” Narvin warned under her breath.

Braxiatel let out a small huff of a laugh as the two women strode up the stairwell. He kept his eyes high toward the landing. “It might be wise for me to remind you one of thing, Narvin.”

“And what might that be?”

Braxiatel lowered his head. He didn’t look to his old friend, preferring to keep his eyes on the movements beyond the kitchen door. “If you wish to seek favour with me for _any_ reason, then upsetting Rose is really not the right way to go about it.” His eyes shifted toward her. “Do thank the stars, however, that she’s not a particularly mean person, nor is she one to hold a grudge. Apologise, and she just might have the power to sway me to give the permission you’re seeking.” He frowned and stepped quickly forward. “Now, if you will excuse me. It seems as though I’m needed.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~

The rather strained and struggled whining and wheezing of capsules too old to want to traverse the Vortex filled Rose’s home. One after another, the capsules that had been parked in Rose’s back yard disappeared. They flashed out of reality with a light screech and cry, leaving behind them a square patchwork pattern of yellowed grass and damp mud.

Phiroi’s capsule departed almost immediately after the six capsules in the yard had disappeared, leaving only two time ships still humming inside her house; Brax’s capsule and the TARDIS.

Rose stood with a lean in the doorway of her kitchen and peered into the yard. It had been so long since she’d been able to see her back fence and the line of bushes and flowers that lined the yard. It horrified her to see all her carefully planted landscaping was now all withered and dead. An exhale escaped between her lips as she likened the withering and death of her backyard to the hope she felt inside her chest about ever having a calm and serene lifestyle of safety and stability.

She felt Navin’s presence at her side and swallowed thickly. “Ready to go, I take it?”

“Braxiatel has asked that I confirm with you of your readiness to depart.”

“As ready as I can be, given the circumstance,” she answered brokenly.

“I’m very sorry,” she offered with genuine empathy in her tone. “This has to be very difficult on you.”

“You have no idea just how much,” she admitted with a wipe at her eyes. She forced a smile onto her face. “But we do what we have to, yeah? For Mother Gallifrey and all that.”

Narvin hummed deeply. “Braxiatel warned me you’d be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Stifling your emotions like you are,” she answered flatly. She exhaled a sigh herself and looked through the door and into the backyard. “Don’t do that to yourself, Rose. Don’t become one of us.”

“I’ve been surrounded by your kind for so long, Narvin, how can’t I?” She looked toward the yard again. “Will I ever have this again, do you think? A home, a real home?” She teared up just slightly. “I don’t know that I can live on a TARDIS for the rest of my life. The children need more than that. _I_ need more than that.”

She lifted a hand to press it lightly on her good shoulder. “Would it make you feel any sense of hope at all to know…”

“Don’t tell me,” she cut in quickly with a look toward her. “Don’t tell me what I have or don’t have in your timeline. You’re three hundred years ahead of me.” She looked back to her ruined back yard. “That’s more than three lifetimes from now.” She blinked and looked upward toward a bird singing on a dead tree branch. “I could be years, decades, until we achieve that. By then I’ll probably be too old to appreciate it.” She bit at her lip and went silent. Several questions were swirling in her mind, all of which, and none of which she wanted answered.

“The most important thing you need to know,” she offered with a sense of clear understanding toward Rose’s current mindset. “Is that for the entire time I’ve know the two of you, his hearts beat for you and you alone. They still do, more than they ever have. You are now, and always will be, his entire universe.”

“Careful,” Rose said with a light chuckle. “You’re destroying your carefully crafted reputation of being an unfeeling and unempathetic git.”

“Brax did warn me that you were a terrible influence against the stoic façade of a Time Lord.”

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t,” she offered with a smile.

“I’d very much appreciate it,” she agreed with a high-pitched sigh. “And as for our conversation earlier…”

“Water under the bridge,” Rose answered quickly. “Emotions are high right now. I get it.” She blew out a breath through pursed lips. “Do know that I would never try and interfere in anyone’s happiness. If you want to court Carein, I’ll poke Brax on your behalf.” She looked toward her. “You hurt her, though, and I’ll make the most public spectacle of you that you’ll never recover from. And don’t kid yourself for a second that I wouldn’t have Brax’s complete support on that.”

“Not entirely sure that it’s a good idea anyway,” she said with a long sigh of disappointment. “With a 300-year timeline variance. The logistics of maintaining an affair of that nature seem almost insurmountable.”

“Love finds a way,” Rose offered. “It always does.”

“Well, we aren’t quite at that point just yet,” Narvin admitted with a smile. “There’s definitely interest on my part. That goes without saying.” Her expression fell to realisation. “But her interest in a damaged fool like me? I don’t know.”

“Then I suggest that you stick around a bit, help all of us settle as best we can on Estrail, and who knows?” She bumped her with her hip. “Maybe Narvin will win her weird penguin’s affections…”

“I have no idea what you mean by that,” she muttered with a lift in her brow. “I’ll assume it’s positive?”

“I hope so,” Rose answered with a genuine laugh. “Because if it isn’t, I’ve just insulted someone who is really, truly, awesome.”

The both looked backward at the bellow from Braxiatel ordering Narvin to join him. Rose looked to her with a wink in her eye. “Best not keep the old boy waiting. Don’t think for a moment he isn’t of the mind to leave you behind just to teach you a lesson on tardiness.”

“Been there, done that,” she answered with a roll in her eyes. “Left me on Thrakviex with no way of getting home for two weeks one time after an envoy assignment.” She shrugged. “All because I was in the midst of relieving myself when he made the boarding call for his capsule. I _could_ provide you with what you might assume is an amusing image of what occurred when I heard the capsule dematerialise, however….”

“Nope,” she popped with a tightening of her eyes in amusement. “Got a few mental images to carry me through that, thanks.” She flicked her head to indicate she should move. “Better not let him wait then. See you on Estrail. Safe journey.”

“Now that you’ve said that,” she moaned as she peeled away from the opposite door frame and turned to walk toward the gold and silver capsule parked on the other side of the Doctor’s TARDIS. “This will be the longest and most terrifying flight in history.”

Rose chuckled as she wandered away. Within only a short moment, she heard Brax’s capsule depart noisily for what would be the last time from his home. Her smile waned toward sadness as she let her eyes trace over the lines and cabinets of a kitchen she’d fallen in love with the moment she’d seen it. It was no longer neatly filled with appliances and bowls of fruit and flowers. Her children’s artwork was no longer held by magnets on the fridge. The whiteboard, which almost always had notes scrawled by Braxiatel, was absent as well. All that remined were the lightly greyed smudge marks from his notes being erased by a paper towel. Her warm and homey kitchen was now barren and empty, baring nothing but an empty fridge and an open dishwasher. Random bits of torn paper and dust bunnies that were preciously hidden underneath or behind an appliance were the only things that remained. 

She closed her eyes and lowered her head as loss started to worm its way into her belly again. She couldn’t fight the deep feeling of pain that settled itself inside her, and within a moment, her eyes ached with tears.

It wasn’t too long before she felt the beat of her heart move in behind her. She loosened the hard press of her arms into her sides to allow him to slide his arms underneath to gently embrace her from behind. She held her breath to settle herself as she lifted her chin to turn her nose in against his throat.

“Are you ready?” he asked her in a gentle tone. 

“No,” she admitted. “I’m not.” She sniffed in wetly and stared at his Adam’s apple as it bobbed with a swallow. A waver entered her voice and she had to close her eyes against his skin to hold back her tears. “I don’t want to go.”

He quickly spun her inside his arms and wrapped himself against her. His mind and his hearts willed her to break against him, to let it all out. As usual, however, she held her emotions fairly firmly in check inside his presence. He closed his thickly watering eyes and held her just a little bit tighter.

“I promise you,” he vowed with a hoarse voice as he let his eyes open and looked at her barren kitchen. In the very short time he’d been back with her, he’d seen just how much of a lively and happy hub this one room was to not only her, but to the children as well. It was so much more than just a kitchen when the entire family milled about inside. It was the conversation centre, the hub of open discussion and laughter, moreso than the living room ever was. It was in here that all of them seemed to shake off any sense of forced propriety and stiff shouldered behavior. A drink of juice or tea, a biscuit or a slice of pie, and the stiffness fled. 

It was the melting pot between Earth and Gallifrey … and by the Gods that meant something to him. It meant something to all of them. This small and seemingly insignificant room where two worlds came together as one.

“I swear to you, Rose,” he vowed fiercely against her hair. “I swear you’ll have of all this, again. Everything you’ve lost.” He drew in a shaking breath. “Everything you’ve had to sacrifice. I’ll make sure you get it all back.”

She lifted a hand to curl around his neck, but she said nothing, seemingly content to just nuzzle her nose into his throat and remain in his hold.

“When we take back Gallifrey,” he breathed out. “We’ll rebuild our home on the orchard. Settle down again under the shadow of Mount Lung. The kids can play in the orchard, climb the trees, fill themselves up on fruit. We’ll swim at the Cascades and kiss underneath the waterfall. We’ll make love underneath the hum of the transduction barrier, surrounded by the stars of a million solar systems, just like we used to.” He sniffed. “I promise you, Rose.”

She let out the smallest of whimpers and tightened the hold of her hand around his neck. With a lift of her chin and a pucker in her lips, she pulled him down to meet her. Their lips met with a gentle connection that started with a light touch, a single chaste, but gentle kiss. It quickly shifted toward a much deeper connection of parted lips and rolling jaws. The Doctor had to pull back when he felt the very tip of her tongue meet with the very tip of his.

“If this goes much further,” he panted lightly against her mouth. “Then I’m going to end up making love to you rather indelicately against this door frame.” He lifted a hand and curled it around the frame as though to test the strength of it.

“Is that such a bad thing?” she said with a light sigh. “We never made love here, Doctor. Not here. Not in this house.”

He smoothed his hands over her hair and looked into her eyes. “I’m sorry we never got the chance to.” He smiled sadly to one side. “If I thought we had time, I’d …” He smiled at her with a waggle in his brow rather than verbally complete that thought.

That did make her smile. She stroked her fingers along his sideburn. “We have the stars watching over Estrail, right?”

“That we do, Darling,” he cooed gently with a kiss at her brow. “That we do. And it will be my honour and my pleasure to take you under an Estralian sky.”

“With the beady eyes of the local Zombie population watching us,” she added with a light chuckle. “Won’t _that_ make it exciting?”

He let out a husky laugh, not quite wanting to erupt as she wanted, given that those zombies were his people caught inside the grip of a horrific virus. He rubbed at her arms and offered her a smile. “We should go. Brax is stopping to pick up your mother, so she’ll meet us there.”

Rose gasped. “Mum! My God, Doctor. I didn’t even think!” There was horror in her eyes and a shake in her shoulders. “Would he really go after her?”

“We don’t know,” he assured her. “But I didn’t want to take the risk that he’d know about her and make her a target.” He gestured toward her shoulder. “I also didn’t want to show up with you like this, so Brax and Romana offered to pick her up.”

Rose looked at her shoulder and bit at her lip. “What story are we giving her on all this?”

“That your timelines have finally aligned and you want to see her.” 

“Have they? Aligned properly, I mean?” she pursed her lips. “Brax was never really sure.”

“Close enough,” he answered with a sigh. “Not far enough to affect the timelines too greatly, but enough that we will have to make her forget temporarily once it’s safe for her to return.” He hovered his hand over her brace, not touching at it. “This, however. We’re going with it being an injury from a car accident.”

“Not entirely untrue, I suppose.”

“Untrue enough to make my eye tic,” he admitted with a huff. “I’m still very angry about it, Rose. I’m not going to lie to you. I want to make Rassilon pay for this.”

Rose nodded with agreement. “Then make sure you do it right,” she said to him with a firm look in her eye. “Wait for Romana and Brax to do what it is they need to do first to ensure that Gallifrey is returned to the leadership she deserves.” Her mouth tipped into a one-sided smile. “And then all of us will hold him down and let you go to town on him. Leave nothing of him, yeah?”

“If I could go back and erase him from all existence, I would,” he said with a sigh. 

“Too easy on him,” she offered. “Not enough suffrage for what he’s done.” She petted his chest with the flat of her hand. “He needs to watch from a distance. He needs to see Gallifrey thrive without him. Needs to see you, Brax, and Romana – the ones he hates most - lead Gallifrey and her people to a greater future than Rassilon could ever hope for.”

“With you at my side,” he vowed. “I think I just might be able to manage it.”

“Nowhere else I want to be,” she promised in return. “My hand in yours, Doctor. It’s all I want. We are better as two than we are as one, yeah?”

“Although as _one_ ,” he breathed out huskily with a waggle in his brow. “We are _quite_ something.”

“You know what I mean, you plum,” she sang out with a genuine laugh. “Wherever you are, Doctor. I promise you I’m at your side. Forever.” She looked around one last time. “Even if it means this all has to wait.” She looked at him. “Because at the end of the day. You and the kids; you _are_ my home.”

“And you are mine,” he replied with hope and longing in his tone. “You always have been, and Rose, I promise you this: You always will be. For as long as I live.” 

“I love you, too,” she said with a smile and a tear in her eyes. “Forever, yeah?”

“Forever,” he repeated. He dropped his hand to take hold of hers. “We should go.”

She gave his hand a squeeze and sighed as she gave her home one last look. “Time to say good bye to this life,” she agreed with a sigh. She looked up at him. “And say hello to new beginnings.”

“Well, at least the bridge between a new beginning at any rate,” he answered with a smile as he walked them toward the open doors of his TARDIS. “Estrail’s just a stop in between this life and the next. Hopefully a very short stop.”

“Hopefully,” she agreed with a nod. She gave a last look over her shoulder toward her home and inhaled a deep sigh that said goodbye to her life here in Chiswick. “Thank you,” she sighed to the home. “And good bye.”

~~ooooOOOoooo~~

The flight to Estrail was fast, and remarkably less bumpy that it usually was on board the TARDIS. Rose thanked the ship for the gentle ride. With the pain in her shoulder returning in force, even the slightest bump in the road would make her yelp with the zing of agony.

The children and the wolves were at the door with an eager skip in their steps as the Doctor went through the shutdown procedures for the old ship. He offered them a smile as he spun the dial that would release the doors for them. “Welcome to Estrail! Our new home for the next little while.”

Mark cheered excitedly. “Brilliant! Can’t wait to explore!”

“Don’t stray too far from the TARDIS,” he warned. “Just outside the door, okay? No further. Stay in sight at all times.”

“Yessssss,” Mark drolled out impatiently. “I know, I know. Be safe and all that.”

“Exactly,” the Doctor warned. “Safe.”

The doors flew open and the sounds of life outside immediately filled the console room. The sounds of excitable children, of eager wolves, and of thousands of Gallifreyans just outside the doors, finally granted the freedom that this new planet would offer each and every one of them. Their London lockdown finally over.

“My God,” Rose said with awe in her tone and a smile in her voice as she looked toward the Doctor. “Do you hear that?”

“They’re happy,” he agreed with a smile of his own as he pulled on his long jacket and took her hand in his. “and to some degree, they’re free.” A grin stretched across his face as he led her to the door. “An entire planet for them to explore, to thrive, and to live.” He seemed so thrilled by the prospect. “Imagine what they can achieve now.”

“I give the Southern Mountaineers two days to set up a new still.”

“I give them less than a day,” he said with a chuckle. He stepped off the threshold ahead of Rose, and turned to help her curl around the door of the TARDIS.

The shrill sound of Jackie Tyler’s voice thundered in angrily from beside another capsule parked not too far away. “Doctor!”

He spun, his eyes wide with surprise. “Jackie! What a pleasure to…”

“Don’t you _what a pleasure_ me, you Alien git,” she charged him. There was fire inside her eyes as she marched up to him. “Oh, I’ve been waitin’ to do this to you,” she growled hotly. “Waitin’ a long time for it…”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	43. Estrail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The group get themselves settled on Estrail... Old friends come together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little one today. Ran out of time as usual.... 
> 
> But I do hope you enjoy as we push into a new beginnings for our jeopardy friendly group of Time Lords and Humans....

~~oooOOOooo~~

The Doctor’s eyes flew open with absolute and utter fear as Jackie Tyler stalked a fast and purposeful stride toward him. Very quickly his mind supplied several rather brilliant options for escape as well as words of defence that – given such a short timespan to form such words - would quite likely only end up escaping his mouth as a splutter. All he could do was take a step away from his wife to safe her from the overflow of whatever was coming his way and then brace himself for it. His eyes slammed shut and his cheeks lifted up into a wince as his teeth grit together in preparation for Jackie Tyler.

“Well,” she huffed with definite amusement. “Got you right scared, then, haven’t I?”

He let one eye open past his wince just slightly. “Just do what you have to do, yeah? Get it over and done with.” His eye slammed shut again and his shoulder lifted in a flinch.

“Oh, come here, you,” she growled with a smile in her voice. She cupped his face in her hands and purred as she peppered his face with kisses. “Oh, you are all mine, aren’t you?”

He gasped and gagged. His hands splayed ether side of him to maintain balance as she pulled him down and forward to be able to reach that stubbled and unshaven face with her kisses. His usual instinct of lightly puckering out his lips when attacked in this manner by his wife or daughter blessedly refused to kick in. Instead he bit his lips together with his teeth and tried vainly to step back out of her grasp.

“As much as I sometimes don’t like you very much, Doctor,” she gushed out as she finally ceased with the kisses and moved to hug him tightly instead. “I can’t deny that it’s very good to see you.”

“I wish I could say the same,” he muttered with a wince on his face and a hard wipe of his sleeve on his cheek. “But really, when you mercilessly attack in this quite inappropriate and uncomfortable manner, I find it difficult to do so.”

She released him with a click in her tongue, but held his face in her hands. “Still rude, I see.”

He was still stooped forward, his head level with hers. The look of disgust still creased his face. “A trait that extends across all of my incarnations, or so I’ve been told.”

“Work on that, yeah?” she said with a pet of her hand on his cheek. “Don’t want my grand babies to carry on that trait, do we?” She stepped back, ignoring the way he aggressively wiped at his face with his sleeves, and turned toward her daughter. Her whole face fell into worry when she saw the brace that covered her shoulder. She took a fast step forward. “Oh, my darling. What happened to you?”

“Hi mum,” Rose said with a smile of complete and utter longing. She held open her good arm to ask for a cuddle. “I’ve missed you.”

“Do I need to thump him?” she asked with a poke of her thumb over her shoulder toward the Doctor.

“Much rather you didn’t,” the Doctor muttered as he finally straightened himself up. He kept dragging his sleeve on his very discomforted face.

“Not his fault,” Rose assured her mother with a growl of happiness at the end of her words as she hugged her mother. “I got into a car accident a few days ago.” She pulled back out of the embrace and tucked her hair around her ear to get it free from her face. “Got T-Boned at the lights.”

“Hold on,” Jackie said with a frown. “Have you been on Earth, Rose? Have you been driving around on Earth and didn’t think to visit your mother?”

“It wasn’t on Earth,” the Doctor lied with remarkable ease. 

“You don’t drive cars on Gallifrey,” Jackie countered with a frown on her face, not willing to buy the lie. “I’ve been there, Doctor. I see how you all travel. It’s all teleporting and TARDISes round there.”

“Actually,” he offered smoothly, the lying coming far too easily. “It was on the planet Finkuns, in the Ulteal system. Very similar to Earth, actually. Well. Sort of. A bit more technologically advanced you’re your species. Their vehicles aren’t exactly the same as what you drive on your planet. Less rubber tyres, and more a quad of hover engines that keep the vehicle two feet from the ground at all times. Quite similar to the hover boards on Earth, but on a much larger scale.”

“More technologically advanced, are they? Then why couldn’t the other driver couldn’t just hover up and around hers, then, Doctor?” she asked with a snip in her tone.

“Doesn’t quite work that way,” he said with a scratch at his sideburn. “The magnetic fields and their hover capabilities really are quite limited in just how high…”

“Do you understand the concept of a rhetorical question, Doctor?” she asked him with a lift in her brows and a sigh on her breath.

He held up both hands and rolled his eyes. “Answer a question, get grief. Don’t answer it, get grief. Hard to win with you, isn’t it, Jackie?”

“When I see my daughter, all braced up like this, then no, you won’t,” she answered. “As I would hope you would behave if you saw your baby trussed up in bandages.” She set her hands on her hips. “And were you in this … this _hover_ car with her at the time?” Her eyes widened and she gasped. “Were my Grandbabies in the car? Are they alright?”

“I was alone, Mum, Rose assured her quickly. “Just wanted to try it out, that’s all.”

“And he let you?” she barked out. “All by yourself on an alien planet?” She turned toward him, fire in her eyes. “Doctor! How could you let her drive in a strange car all by herself where anything could happen? And, I might add, something _did_ happen.”

He palmed his face and let out a long groan as he dragged that hand down his face. “By the love of Omega…”

Braxiatel’s voice held a vast amount of humour in his tone. “Jackie, my dear. Words can never adequately convey the absolute pleasure I feel whenever we are graced with your presence.”

The Doctor looked to his brother with a frown of annoyance. “Oh, shut up.”

“Don’t you be impolite to your brother,” Jackie chided him. She smiled at Braxiatel and the young dark-haired toddler he held protectively on his hip. “You could really learn a thing or two about talking to ladies from Irving here. Smooth as silk and all charm, he is.”

“I’d really have to be in the presence of a lady first,” he muttered under his breath.

Jackie flashed him a glare. “What did you just say?”

“Nothing complimentary,” he said with an exhale and a lift of his eyes to the lavender sky above them. He lowered his eyes and pouted as he slipped his hands inside his trouser pockets. “Don’t let the smooth charm fool you, Jackie. Brax isn’t all he’s making you think he is. Both the snake and the charmer, that one.”

“Well that isn’t very polite of you at all, is it?” Braxiatel scoffed. He shifted the child on his hip and looked down to where she was gnawing on the lapel of his blazer. “Tonza Thete isn’t being very polite, is he, Clara, darling?”

Jackie cooed. “Oh, she’s just darling, Irving.” She reached up to hook Clara’s hair behind her ear. “I’m so happy that you and the lovely Romana decided to make a family together. I always said that you’d be a perfect father.”

“Why thank you, Jackie,” he answered with his most disarming smile. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the scowl of his brother and opted to take this one step further if only to truly piss off Thete. He took Jackie’s hand in his and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “To have such kind words given to me by the woman who single-handedly gave the universe a woman as remarkable and magnificent as your beautiful Rose is an honour.”

The Doctor dropped his head backward and let out a long moan through an open mouth.

“Oh, I really like you,” Jackie swooned. She looked back to Rose with a lift in her brow. “Are we sure the two of them are related?”

“I ask myself the same question on an hourly basis,” the Doctor muttered with a glare toward a very amused Braxiatel.

There was a squeal of excitement from the right. “Nanna Jackie!!” Mark bounded across the grass, practically dragging a surprised Alirra behind him by her hand. At their sides, in protective formation, three wolves followed.

“Mark!” Jackie cried out with a dip in her knees to welcome him into her arms. “Oh my, haven’t you grown?” She looked to the shy and slightly suspicious little girl dressed in light purple who had curled herself against her father’s leg. She was half-hidden underneath the length of his coat and blinked her big blue eyes around his pinstriped leg. “Is that Alirra?”

“Oh-oh,” Braxiatel said with a light chuckle. 

“Just how long has it been?” Jackie demanded angrily. “She was only a month past being born when I saw her last. She’s got to be at least four, now.”

“It’s all about timelines and a temporal error in our last visit…” the Doctor huffed out. “It’s a complicated explanation of time and all of her very important nuances and rules that could result in the destruction of all reality if they aren’t specifically adhered to…”

“I’ve heard this natter from you before,” she growled. “When you were all smooth talkin’, fancy-dressed, wild curly hair. How long was it then, Doctor? How long did you hide my baby from me then? Long enough to marry her, set up house and start having babies, wasn’t it?”

It was really quite tempting to claim that it wasn’t him, that it was a much younger man in a very different body than he was. He merely lowered himself into a crouch to speak with his little girl. “Aly, darling. That’s your nanna Jackie. She’s your mum’s mum. Go and say hello.”

Rose held out her hand to her daughter. “Come on, baby. Come here and meet your nanna.” She looked to her husband and lessened her voice to a whisper of urging. “this is your chance to escape. Run. Quick.”

“Oh by the Gods my hearts beat for you,” he vowed fiercely through his teeth.

“Go,” she ordered him with a flare in her eyes. “Before you lose the chance to.” She looked to her mother as Alirra’s hand finally found hers. “You’ll have to excuse the Doctor, Mum. He’s got some things he needs to do.”

“Oh, I bet he does,” she sniffed. “Coward.”

“You have no idea,” he muttered under his breath as he strode toward his amused elder brother. “You better start sleeping with one eye open, Brax.”

“Oh, I do love it when Jackie comes to visit.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes and shook out his shoulders. “I suppose I’m putting her up in the TARDIS?”

“Unless you want her to sleep in the forest, yes.”

The Doctor seemed to consider it a moment. His brows quickly dropped and he gave the smallest of smiles. “I’ll see that the old girl pulls out all the fixings for her, then. A happy Jackie makes a happy … _everyone_.”

“You do love the woman, though,” Braxiatel mused quietly. 

“More than I’ll ever admit to.” He strode with Braxiatel between capsules to reach the outer clearing. “Have you had a chance to meet with your elder self, Leela, or Andred?”

He shook his head. “Arrived only a moment before you did. Narvin – the female version of him – went in search of them with Romana.”

“And our current Narvin?”

“He’s back on Gallifrey,” Braxiatel answered as he shifted Clara on his hip. “Monitoring the homestead for us and doing what he can to both tighten up security in the networks and keep Estrail out of the scent of the sniffer dogs.” He whipped his kerchief square from his breast pocket and dabbed at her drooling mouth. “Messy little thing, aren’t you, dear?”

“Teething, probably,” the Doctor said almost distractedly. “Both of mine were drooling, slobbering messes when their teeth were coming in.” He let his eyes shift toward the gurgling little girl. “You’ve become quite besotted with the little one, haven’t you?”

“She’s to be my daughter,” he said with a light smile down toward her. “My duty as a father demands it.” He looked back to the Doctor. “I am as taken by her as I am your little one.” His eyes drifted forward. “As I suspect I will be toward any little ones that come along to join our family.”

“Never quite pictured you as a father,” he mused.

“As the humans say: Ditto,” Braxiatel remarked. “Yet, here we are, both responsible for young lives.”

“And aged ones as well,” the Doctor said with a long sigh. “Hundreds of thousands of them.”

Braxiatel’s expression hardened quickly. His voice fell to a lower timbre than was typical. “We have a few logistics we have to think through before I can feel comfortable about all this. There is nothing easy about homing them all here on Estrail for the coming … however long it is.”

“Such as?” the Doctor asked. “They all seem happy to have achieved some level of freedom.” He sighed. “London was a safe haven for them, but it was extremely confining for all of them.”

“Rose and Romana did what they could with the youngsters and eager volunteers,” he reminded him. “Field trips and the such.”

“I’m not suggesting for a moment that our wives didn’t do all they could,” the Doctor was quick to defend. “I’m incredibly proud of and in awe of the both of them.” He exhaled. “But you have to admit that being confined to the backyard of a single home on a planet alien to them was akin to being jailed. For nothing more than simply being Gallifreyan.”

“It was that or be killed,” Braxiatel said with a huff. “Which is something none of us could allow. But know that it was never a forced move for any of them. They knew the conditions, and what to expect when they were rescued from the fires of war. We didn’t remove anyone who denied our offers of assistance.”

The Doctor thrust his hands into his pockets and walked with his shoulders held up, but his head set deep into his neck. “How long do you think we’ll have to lay low here on Estrail, anyway?”

“That all depends,” Braxiatel answered carefully.

“On what?”

“On Romana.” He lifted and then pulled Clara a little bit closer to him and pressed his lips into her hair in a tender move of fatherly affection. “And how she feels over the next little while. We won’t move until I know she’s absolutely ready to do so.”

“Well, I would think the sooner the better, don’t you?”

“Hard to say,” he answered quietly. He drew in a deep breath and settled Clara down deep on his hip. She yawned widely and then popped her thumb into her mouth. She whimpered just lightly and closed her eyes against his chest. “Romana wants to handle this in a manner most appropriate for her ultimate goal…”

“Reclaiming her presidency and returning Gallifrey to her people,” the Doctor injected with a nod of his head and a wave in his hand. “Yes, yes. I get that. I support it. I also understand why Romana wants this done in a more … “ he sighed. “In a more political manner.”

“Assassination to achieve that reclamation – despite how much I simply _do_ support that option right at this juncture – really only leads to further assassination attempts down the line when someone decides they don’t like her leadership,” Braxiatel muttered. “She took it by force, why not someone else follow that same path?” 

“She wants legitimacy to her presidency, I understand that,” the Doctor pressed. “What I don’t understand is why we’re holding back and waiting. You and Romana are in a perfect postion _right now_ to make a legitimate case for an election to be called…”

“Not yet,” he breathed out. “At least not right now.”

“Why not?” His brow pinched tight. 

“Because I said so,” Braxiatel hissed warningly through his teeth. “We have new considerations to take into account before we embark on a months-long election process of undue stress and upset on my wife.” He pursed his lips and lightly shook his head. “Not right now.’

“You’ve just gone and defined her entire existence since the moment she first vied for Presidency almost a thousand years ago,” he argued. “I can’t see why now would be any different, nor why she’d shy away from it. Like it or not, stress, backstabbing, and upset are the side-effects of a career in politics.”

“Just leave it,” Braxiatel huffed. “Please, Thete. Just this one time, accept the decisions made by others.”

“If you say so,” he answered with a shrug. “In the meantime, what are you proposing we do to wile away the hours, days, and months until you and Romana decide to remove Rassilon from office?”

“Prepare those who wish to fight for Gallifrey to prepare to do so,” Narvin answered with a one-sided smirk from behind them. “Because, trust me, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

Both Braxiatel and the Doctor turned quickly toward her voice, turning in such a manner as to end up with Clara’s sleeping little body being held to the centre of them both. At the tree-line were Narvin, Romana, Leela, Andred and the elder incarnation of Braxiatel. They stood in a formation that lended a rather super-heroesque to the group. Not surprisingly, Braxiatel and Romana were at the centre of the formation; two powerful figures standing tall in the slowly fading sunlight at their backs. Narvin remained lightly off to their right, her hair blowing and her A-symmetrical tunic edges lifting and shifting with the winds racing across her shoulder. Leela was a tall stature beside her husband to the left of the power-couple. She stood almost side-on to the Doctor and earlier Braxiatel, her chin was high and she looked along her shoulder toward them both. Her knives were unsheathed and held at the ready in both hands. Andred stood as a looming and imposing figure in the shadows a mere step behind her.

“Well,” the Doctor scoffed after a second. “I’m beginning to suspect that we aren’t exactly needed for this battle, Brax.” He gestured toward the group. “Let Rassilon take a good look at that image and he’ll turn robe and run. Not quite sure if adding a skinny man in pinstripes to that ensemble will add to the allure of it or diminish the power it exudes.”

Braxiatel hummed and shook his head as he walked forward. “Don’t underestimate how formidable an image you can project when you’re appropriately triggered, Thete.” He looked dead ahead of him. “Omega knows you’ve been able to terrify even _me_ at times.”

“If only,” he replied with a breathy sigh as he followed behind his brother. “It’s the dream.”

“If you carried a weapon instead of relying solely on your endlessly running mouth, maybe you’d be more successful at it.”

“And my brain,” the Doctor added with a smirk. “Let’s not forget my ability to think on my feet…”

“The ability to think at all would be a fine thing.”

“Oh, do shut up.”

The pair approached the five-person group in a guarded, yet relaxed manner to them. The Doctor still had his hands in his pockets in a relaxed slouch. Braxiatel walked tall, but with a gentleness in his stride so as not to waken the youngster on his hip. There was a smile on his face when Romana immediately stepped forward with her arms held outward for the youngster. She took Clara into her arms and sighed adoringly down to her pouty, sleeping expression.

The Doctor didn’t miss the unusually tender way in which his brother greeted his wife, and the charmingly soft kiss he pressed to her mouth. The way his hand slid down along her belly to settle against her womb to be joined a moment later by Romana’s hand gave the Doctor pause. His brother’s name whispered softly out between his lips in a manner of understanding, of awe and pride, and immediately he understood Braxiatel’s apprehensions to move too quickly ahead.

…And very quickly the protective instinct within him flared – both for his brother and for Romana.

“Doctor,” Narvin’s voice called, which drew his attention away from Braxiatel’s budding family.

“Yes, Narvin?”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d heard me or not,” she answered him somewhat sternly.

“The more important consideration is whether or not I was even listening,” he said with a shrug. “The answer to that is no, and therefore it can also be presumed that I didn’t hear you. Would you mind repeating?”

“If I have your full attention, of course.”

“Partly at the very least,” he said with a cheeky smirk. “Not often anyone gets it in full.”

Narvin’s expression was unimpressed and annoyed as she drew in a long breath. “Narvin confirmed from Gallifrey a few moments ago that a full raid on the London location was executed by the Chancellery Guards less than thirty minutes after you departed with your wife – a full twelve hours ahead of schedule.”

“Okay,” the Doctor said with a swallow and a somewhat strangled tone to his voice. “You have my full attention now.”

“Rassilon ordered a full scale, 12-capsule squadron to materialise within the domicile. Orders were to use lethal force against any resistance.” She closed her eyes and inhaled a deep breath. “Timelines are shifting, Doctor, and it’s making me very uncomfortable.”

“As it is for me as well,” the elder Braxiatel admitted.

“Time is still in flux, yeah?” the Doctor queried. “The timelines that include the two of you are still stable, are they not?”

“For now, yes,” Narvin said with a nod. “But it won’t take much to destabilise them completely, which can put all of reality at stake.”

“Is this Rassilon’s doing?” the younger Braxiatel asked with a deep inhale and a protective curl of himself around Romana. “Is he pushing the boundaries of temporal law to change the outcome of this timeline?”

“I suspect so,” Narvin answered. “I’ve asked my younger incarnation to further investigate Rassilon’s more underhanded dealings to confirm. He has no future incarnations that Braxiatel and I are aware of. His timeline is supposed to end within the next …” she cleared her throat. “Within the next little while.”

“Which means that It’s on you all to ensure that happens,” elder Braxiatel warned. “I won’t go as far as to suggest that Rassilon’s ultimate demise is a fixed point in the turn of the universe itself – but it definitely has an impact in the turn of Gallifrey and where our planet moves from here.”

“Demise, or defeat?” the Doctor questioned. “Because the distinction between the two is somewhat important. I’d rather prefer not to have to kill someone if it’s unnecessary to the turn of the universe…”

“I have not got a problem with that,” Leela said with a dark smile. “If you feel that you are not able to end that filthy creature’s existence, then I promise you I will not lose any sleep over staining my blades with his blood.”

“And I’ll be standing right beside my wife as she does it,” Andred confirmed. “The biggest mistake our people have ever made was to allow Rassilon to rise from his tomb. Our duty to the universe is to put him back in there.”

“Any chance we can send him a gift basket filled with the Dogma virus?” the Doctor said with a growl I his tone. “Let nature deal with him instead of us.”

“We’d be just as guilty if we all took a shot at him at the same time,” younger Braxiatel said with a sideward glance toward the Doctor.

The Doctor lifted his hands to clutch fistfuls of his hair. “Yet it’s perfectly okay for him to infect thousands of our people with the same?” he argued more to himself than anyone else as he paced in a circle. 

“It was _not_ okay,” Andred growled. “And I can assure you that each and every one of the Time Lords we’ve resurrected from the grip of the virus so far mirror the same opinion as I do on that matter. They are each ready to stand up against Rassilon once Estrail has been freed of the grip of Dogma entirely.”

The Doctor ceased pacing. “And how are those efforts going?”

“It is a slow task,” Leela admitted. “A day of hunting does not always go successfully. There are days where we see those who are affected behind every tree. And then there are some days where we find no victims at all.”

Elder Braxiatel agreed with a nod of his head. “We know the sick are located on the Northern Hemisphere of Estrail and we’ve kept it contained. It hasn’t extended to the southern regions, and I don’t expect it will.” He drew in a long breath. “I’d say we’ve cured no more than a third of those afflicted. With support from those who have recovered, we are increasing our own hunting party numbers.”

“Then allow me to join in on the hunt,” the Doctor offered. “I’m quite sure the wolves will be eager to assist.”

“We want these people in one piece, Thete,” elder Braxiatel said with a grunt. “Not in several pieces.”

“They’ll keep them in one piece if I tell them to,” he said with a shrug. His lips pursed. “Or at least if Rose tells them to. They do tend to get a little petulant with me when I try to issue order on them.”

“And just how does that feel when someone behaves like that with you?” younger Braxiatel asked with a challenging expression.

“Will you shut up?”

“I will hunt with the female,” Leela said in a voice that held demand as she straightened herself tall. “I have said to you several times, Braxiatel, that if we had the wolves our hunts would be more fruitful than they have been to now. Why you have not allowed this, I do not know.”

“Because he doesn’t like them,” the Doctor said with a wry smirk. “Soliarn scares him.”

“The mean one,” he replied with a snort. “I can’t deny it. Great brute that he is.”

“So, I’ll hunt with Soliarn,” the Doctor offered. He looked to his brother. “I expect that you and Romana will work with Rose to keep the refugees secure and out of trouble?”

“Actually,” Narvin said slowly. “I’d appreciate Rose’s help on a project if you don’t mind, Doctor.”

“Rose isn’t in any physical shape right now to engage in any kind of _project_ ,” he declined with a shake in his head. “I’d prefer that Rose remain with the main group for now.” He lifted his chin and looked down the length of his nose toward her. “You have plenty of other people who can assist you in whatever task you have set. Carein, for example. You do seem to enjoy her company.”

Narvin licked at her lips, but she seemed less enamored by Carein’s name and more annoyed by the Doctor playing it up. “While I do enjoy Carein’s company and will likely seek out her companionship during quieter times, she is unable to assist me in the way I believe Rose can.” 

“And in what way might that be?”

She sniffed. “I have several hundred abandoned travel capsules that need to be assessed, logged, registered, and reassigned where necessary.” There was a shift in her expression that quickly fell toward her typical neutrality. “Rose has, shall I say, a very special affinity with the travel capsules. Moreso than anyone I’ve met anywhere along my own timeline…”

Elder Braxiatel quickly agreed. “Narvin’s right.”

“The last time she was in the vicinity of that graveyard of Capsules, her mind was overwhelmed and in danger of burning up completely,” younger Braxiatel warned. “I had to go in her mind to pull her free of their hold.”

“Her mind isn’t capable of holding them back,” the Doctor agreed. “They’re telepaths with great power. Rose has a human mind, and as magnificent as it is, it isn’t strong enough to fight against them.”

Narvin and elder Braxiatel shared a look and gave each other a nod. Elder Braxiatel turned his attention toward the Doctor. “If I vow to you that her mind will be safe, that she will be able to handle anything those ships say to her; any mental intrusion. If I swear oath to you that her mind is protected, will you change your mind?”

“Protected by what?” he queried with a light narrow in his eyes.

“By a Time Lord,” he assured him. “A Time Lord mind.”

The Doctor narrowed his eyes toward his elder brother. “Why do I feel like there’s something you aren’t telling me?”

“Because you don’t trust me,” elder Braxiatel answered with a shrug in his shoulders. He exhaled. “Thete. You know how I feel about Rose. How deeply she is seared inside my hearts. I would give lives to protect her, you know that. If I promise you she is safe then you can be assured she will be.”

“I feel that you should trust Braxiatel,” Romana said without a single measure of doubt in her voice. “He would never allow her to come to harm. If it will make you feel better, I will accompany her myself to ensure her safety.”

The Doctor’s eyes flicked toward her belly, then quickly shot up to her eyes. There was a light shake in his head as he considered whether or not Romana might be at risk in the presence of ailing and unbonded capsules. “I. I don’t think that’s necessary,” he said rapidly. “If you say to trust Brax, then for once, maybe I will.”

“Will wonders never cease?” younger Braxiatel sang to the sky.

“Not on this day, anyway,” the Doctor answered with a shrug. He looked to Narvin. “Ask Rose if she’s interested. I won’t try and stop her if she wants to assist, but I _will_ keep a close eye on her when she returns at the end of a day. If I see any signs of telepathic fatigue, I will put an end to it.”

“Seems fair,” she said with a nod of her head. “I respect that and will honour your decision if it should come to that. But, as I said, I have no doubt at all that she will be fine.”

A sudden rumble in the distance captured the attention of the entire group. The rumble shifted into a loud crash that lit up the darkening sky.

The Doctor’s face widened with horror. “That came from the new encampment,” he called out worriedly as he turned and broke into a run in the direction of a rising grey stack of smoke. 

~~oooOOOooo~~


	44. Southern Moonshine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Those pesky Southern Mountaineers just don't quite know when to quit. Narvin and Rose get to work...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got kicked out of my home "office" this afternoon by a lad who wants to take over the world!! Or at least my work area.... Therefore time was horribly limited.
> 
> It's a long weekend this weekend, and because of that, I chose not to leave a cliffhanger or anything like that. Thought I'd leave a light hearted chapter and ending instead. (you really didn't want to read my original ending to the chapter....)
> 
> Anyway. I leave you with this and wish you all a very happy weekend! See you Tuesday.

~~oooOOOooo~~

Jackie carried a curious little girl on her hip as she walked beside Rose amongst the people happily milling about around them. Mark skipped eagerly at their side both petting at Tiallu’s fluffy head and yapping away with a mixture of very rapid English and Gallifreyan as he tried to regale Jackie with stories about what he’d been doing for the past few years.

Alirra seemed comfortable enough, but as she pressed her ear to her grandmother’s chest in search of the dual beating of Time Lords hearts, she let out a whimper of question to her mother. She petted her little hand in the space between Jackie’s breasts.

“What is she doing?” Jackie asked curiously, keeping her surprise out of her voice so as not to upset the young girl.

“She’s wondering why you only have one heart,” Rose answered. “She likes to listen to your heartbeat when she’s looking to cuddle. Brax, Romana, and the Doctor have two hearts. I’m the only person who has just the one.”

“Two hearts,” she breathed out in reply with a shake of her head. “Not something I’m really going to come to grips with. One of the damn things is trouble enough. Hate to think of havin’ to deal with two of them.”

Rose smiled a genuine grin and then looked to her daughter. “It’s okay, baby,” she assured her gently. “Nanna Jackie has one heart, just like Mummy does.”

“One?” Alirra confirmed with her eyes widening with this new information. She nodded lightly and nestled her head against Jackie’s chest and let out a contented sigh as she looked up at her. “Like Mummy.”

Jackie looked down into a pair of huge blue eyes that swirled with the questions and the spin of the entire universe. She breathed out in awe. “This one’s going to break hearts,” she mused. “The Doctor better have a shotgun handy for when the fellas start calling. Not sure that the sonic whatever-he’s-got is going to be all that effective at putting them off.”

“More likely that it’ll be the Cardinal towering in threat than it will be the Lord Doctor,” Carein said with a laugh in her voice as she stepped toward Rose, her clipboard pressed up against her chest. She touched at Alirra’s hair with affection. “He has a very deep connection with the child and is fiercely protective of her.” She looked to Mark with a smile. “He with the both of them.”

“Who is the Cardinal?” Jackie asked. She tilted her head. “And who are you?”

“Brax is the Cardinal,” Rose answered.

“Oh, you have to be kidding me,” Jackie answered with a laugh. “Is that a thing with these Gallifrey-types? All their names begin with ‘ _The’_?”

“His Lord Braxiatel is a Cardinal in the High Council,” Carein answered with a lift in her brows. “It is his station on Gallifrey, his title, Ma’am.”

“Jackie, please.” Her brows lifted and she shook her head in wonder. “And that delightful man is a Lord as well. I must say it’s a fitting title for him. All class and charm that one.”

“The Doctor’s a Lord,” Rose offered. She winked to her mother. “Which makes _me_ a Lady.”

Jackie threw her head back with a laugh. “Oh, that’s rich, that is. _You_ , a _lady_? Madam, more like.”

“A word which has so many connotations to it, I could either be offended or agree with you completely,” Rose said with a sigh and a chuckle. “This is Lady Carein, by the way. She’s my rock and saviour. One of the most important women in my life right now.”

“I am not a Lady,” Carein corrected. “But I am flattered, of course.” She smiled warmly toward Jackie. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Jackie. I will be honoured to assist you in any way you require as you settle in the encampment.”

“If you’re not Lady, then neither am I,” Rose challenged with a purse in her lips and a lift in her brows. “Because you’re more worthy of the title than I am.” She grinned widely and danced a little sway in place. “And you’ve got a Time Lord – Lady – who’s captivated by you.”

She quickly reddened and shyly shifted her finger through her hair to hook it over her ear. “I could never be quite that fortunate, Lady Rose. Lady Narvin is very much beyond the reach of an Outsider of the likes of me.”

Rose’s brows shot high into her forehead as excitement filled her features. “Do I sense some interest on your part?”

“Oh,” she breathed out, reddening further. “It would be inappropriate for me to answer that question with any honesty.”

Rose let out a peep. “Oh! Then you have to let me help make it happen!” She turned to her mother. “Mum, have you met Narvin, yet?”

“That brunette bombshell that was travelling with Romana and Irving?” Jackie asked with a look of appreciation. “Absolutely gorgeous, that one. Doesn’t know a lick about it, though.”

“I know, right?” A smile formed on one side of her mouth. “But I think that’s just who Narvin is, the male incarnation of him is pretty fit as well. Doesn’t know it, though. You know, unlike Brax and the Doctor who are hot and know it.”

“Male incarnation?” Jackie asked with a lift in her brow and a quick look toward Carein, who was chuckling into her hand in with agreement with Rose. 

“Well, yeah, about that…”

“It’s something that’s just going to confuse me, isn’t it?” Jackie asked with a lift of her eyes to the sky. “One of those things about these alien friends of yours that’s just going to get me all worked up and want to run and take my grandbabies with me.”

A rubble shook the ground at their feet, followed shortly by a hiss that quickly rose in volume. A loud cry that contained the Gallifreyan staple of all swears sounded out, followed by an urgent: “Fire in the Hole! Look out!”

“Oh no,” Rose muttered as she pulled Mark toward her and curled around him as best she could. “Behind me, Mum,” she ordered sharply. “Dunno how big it’s gonna be, but if they’re freaked out by it…”

Carein merely sighed and looked toward the thick forest wall with a tired expression. She stood tall and without so much as a flinch against the heated shockwave winds of explosion that quickly followed a large pack of Gallifreyans that burst free of it.

“Couldn’t even wait a few hours, could they?” she growled under her breath as the heat and fire shifted and warped into a tall column of grey smoke over the trees. “Gragnolegriallan!” she called out with anger in her tone toward who looked to be the eldest of the group.

“It’s okay, Carein,” Gragnol assured her with a broad grin as he opened his arms wide in presentation of himself to her. “Nothing too severe. Just a slight miscalculation made by a rookie. But no mind. No one’s hurt.”

“Speak for yourself,” another young man growled, his face blackened. Half his hair was singed and missing, as were his eyebrows and eyelashes. 

“Ahhh, Thuxtu, it’s hair, it’ll grow back.”

“All of you!” Carein admonished in a booming voice of chiding. “You were told by his Lord Cardinal to hold off on your mischief for a couple of days – he was very specific in pointing out this very particular kind of nonsense!”

“What can I say. Carein?” He shrugged. “You can’t hold a Southern Mountaineer down.”

“Do you really want to issue that challenge?” she growled hotly. The arm holding her clipboard to her chest dropped to one side, an indicator to all that she was definitely not happy with any of them right now. She stalked a hard march toward them, and then past so that she could investigate the damage beyond the tree line for herself. She grabbed the group leader by the collar of his shirt to haul him into line beside her. “It’s not very wise of you to tempt me like that, Gragnolegriallan. Not wise at all.”

The Doctor burst into the clearing with skid of his Converse on the grasses and a flap of his coat. His eyes were wide and wild as he looked around with urgency. “What happened? Is everyone okay?” His eyes quickly sought out the small grouping that was his family and he let out a relieved breath to see they were unhurt.

Braxiatel’s entrance was far less urgent than his brother and was more a stalk of command than a panicked arrival. His voice boomed angrily as he stalked past his brother. “Gragnolegriallan! I swear to our founders if you and your group are responsible for this…”

The Doctor spared his brother a quick glance as Braxiatel marched toward the treeline

“We’re fine,” Rose answered him with amusement written across her face. “Nothing to be too worried about, Doctor. Just the Southerners getting an early start on things.”

“Brax’ll kill the lot of them,” he said with a sigh as he curled his hand around the back of her head to pull her toward him. He kissed the centre of her brow and slowed his breathing to something more reasonable. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“As okay as I can be,” she said with a laugh. She saw Narvin appear with the elder of the two Braxiatels, Romana, Leela, and Andred and beamed a wide grin. “Hey, Narv!” she called out with a chipper tone as she weaved around the Doctor. “If you wanna see the majesty of Carein tearing an absolute strip off someone, now’s your chance.”

“I’m sorry?” she queried with a one brow held down over her eye, the other seated high on her forehead. “I don’t understand what you mean by that.”

The Doctor let out a long sigh. “It means the one who has captured your interest is currently berating whoever it was that caused the …” he exhaled. “The disturbance just now. My wife is suggesting that it might be a condition that you might find to be somewhat _impressive_.”

A smile stretched across Narvin’s face. “Well. Indeed it might. Thank you for letting me know.” She pointed toward the treeline. “This way, then?”

~~oooOOOOooo~~

When Rose had agreed to work with Narvin to catalogue the abandoned time capsules in the Northern region of Estrail, she had expected to be working with the future incarnation of him. She was surprised then, when she walked to the agreed-to meeting place at the edge of the encampment and found herself in the presence of the Narvin that lived in her own timeline.

“Oh?” she remarked with a smile. “It’s you?”

He seemed unimpressed and let out a light exhale as he snapped a small transporter band around her wrist. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“I’m not disappointed,” she confirmed with a smile as she chased the movement of his head with a shift of hers. “Just surprised. It was your future self who approached me about this.”

He finally lifted his eyes to hers. “I was otherwise occupied,” he answered. “Busy on Gallifrey dealing with High Council and his Lord Rassilon during the mission debrief.” His eyes widened and his cheeks puffed out as he let out a breath through pursed lips. “He was not a happy President, let me tell you.”

“What happened?”

He shook his head. “Just a failed assignment by the Chancellery Guard teams. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.” He held her wrist and dragged his thumb along her pulsepoint. “Now. Travel by this method can get a little bumpy. Are you ready?”

Her bottom lip jutted out just slightly. “Are you sure we can’t just walk there, or something?”

“We’re needed on the other side of the planet. Walking would take months.”

“I see,” she said with a light wince. She held that wince as she looked into his face. “This is going to hurt a little bit, isn’t it?”

“Ordinarily no,” he answered. His eyes fell to her shoulder. “Can’t be sure how the trip will be with that.” He swallowed, then sniffed. “If you’d prefer to wait, that’s your choice. I can manage on my own if necessary.”

“I said I’d help,” she assured him firmly. “And I will. And besides, if it’s helpin’ the capsules, I think a little bit of pain in the shoulder is worth it. Don’t you?”

“My opinion on it is really quite irrelevant,” he answered. “But as you asked: Yes, my personal thought is that they’re very much worth it.”

“Then let’s do it,” she said with a smile. Her smile fell toward question. “So how do I do it?”

“Hold onto me,” he said to her, his arms coming around to lightly embrace her. “Less chance of becoming separated in the wormhole.”

“Oooh,’ she sang cheekily as she stepped into his arms, looping her good arm around his back. “A cuddle from Narvin. Lucky me.” She put her chin on his chest and looked up at him. Her voice fell to a whisper. “I won’t tell my husband if you don’t.”

“Just don’t,” he said with a sigh that hid his own amusement. He flicked up a brow and tightened his hold as he activated the travel bracelets. “And besides, it wouldn’t be the Doctor I’d particularly concerned about.”

They both grit their teeth as the rushing winds of flight raced across their bodies. Narvin’s shoulder and the arm he looped around hers seemed to save her injury from the bulk of the force, but she still felt a twinge of an ache that shifted toward full-blown pain.

In a short moment it was over, however, and Rose pushed herself quickly out of his hold to stomp angrily on the swampy-surface of their landing zone. 

“Forgive me for this, Narvin,” she huffed. “But this needs to be said. Repeated. Yelled….”

“Okay,” he answered with light question in his gaze. “And that is?” He drew in a deep and wide-eyed gulp when she launched into a litany of every single Gallifreyan swear she’d ever heard Braxiatel grunt out in his frustrated moments. “Oh. My. That is really quite… Ehm. Wow.” He blinked rapidly as she continued her rant. “And you kiss your children with that mouth?”

She calmed down after a moment and stopped her stomping. She leaned forward to sneer at the mud and held her shoulder with her good hand. She panted out a few long, deep, controlled breaths. “Childbirth,” she muttered. “Piece of cake by comparison.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he ventured. “I’ve heard tales that I would have preferred not to have heard.” He leaned to one side to match her lean somewhat. “Will you be alright; or do you need a few moments?”

“A knife,” she snarled. “I need a knife. Cut it off. Cut off the arm and it won’t hurt anymore.”

“That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?”

She twisted her head to him to sneer out a rather rude piece of thought that her mind had supplied for retort. Her lips even curled to prepare to say it. However, a rather swift wash inside her mind had her exhale a breath so long that drained her completely. Her inhaled was ragged and deep, a forced and hard inhale rather than a concentrated calm one. Slowly she straightened up and did so with a light sway in her back.

“Narvin?” she called worriedly. “Something… Something’s not right.”

He rushed across the mud and held his hands against her cheeks. His eyes narrowed with analysis into hers. “What’s wrong?”

“My head,” she answered with a pinch in her eyes. “Feels kind’ve muffled? Ehm … swimming?”

“Take a deep breath,” he urged her calmly. “Look at me if you want or close your eyes. Focus on what’s in your mind and tell me everything.” He gulped in deeply. Braxiatel and his elder self had assured him that Rose would be fine to handle herself against the telepathic onslaught of so many travel capsules. “If it’s too much,” he breathed out. “I’ll call the Doctor to come for you.”

“No no no,” she whispered out. “It’s not that it’s too much, or that I can’t handle it.” She closed her eyes and drew in a long breath that she held onto as she took his advice and let herself acclimatise to the new noise inside her head. “It’s just really unusual, that’s all.”

“Not like the TARDIS, or the other capsules you’re already acquainted with?”

Her eyes were still closed. She bit at her bottom lip and straightened up her back. The pain in her shoulder had disappeared completely, not even a light and dull ache remained in its place. She focused on the swimming inside her mind and found herself surrounded by the curious minds of an entire field of telepathic beings. 

The last time she’d experienced this, she’d been overwhelmed and in considerable pain. Now, they seemed to exist in a polite and very deliberately placed positioning at the very edges of her consciousness.

“Hello,” she whispered out finally.

“Hello?” Narvin echoed with question. His fingers shifted on her face, ready to move toward her temples to dig her out if she felt she was in too deep.

Rose lifted her hand to cover one of his. Slowly she opened her eyes and found herself staring into a worried pair of dark hazel eyes seated far too close to hers to be considered polite social distancing. She didn’t back away hurriedly or shirk away from him at all. Instead, she smiled widely at him, softening her gaze with happiness and contentment.

“It’s beautiful, Narvin.”

“What is?” he queried worriedly without pulling back.

“Them,” she breathed out in reply. “The capsules.” She swallowed and sighed. “I can hear them in inside my mind. All of them. Singing, talking…” One brow pinched. “Some of them upset and weeping.”

“Does it hurt you?” he questioned.

She shook her head slowly. “No. It’s beautiful.”

“Are you quite sure?” He felt the need to press, just in case. Braxiatel had warned him that she’d lessen her pain if she felt any if only to show that she wasn’t weak; that she was as strong as they were. “Because, Rose. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’m really fine,” she said with a smile. She stepped back from him and held onto her smile as she dipped her head and hooked her hair behind her ear. “Shall we begin, then?”

He watched her for a moment with scrutinous eyes as she walked. He watched the gait of her stride and the hold of her head. His eyes trailed over the tightness in her muscles, looking for any sign of weakness. There was none that he could immediately see, so he let out a breath and gave a nod. “Over here,” he said with a gesture toward a small field table with a pair of tablets and helmet lights. Beside those were a pair of round orbs that Rose recognised as the portable light sources that the Time Lords used when no other natural lighting was available. “I came by a little earlier to drop off what I think we might need.”

“Right,” she said with firmness of duty in her tone. She walked to the table and stood at the very edge of it. “So what is it that we’re doing, exactly?”

He pursed his lips in thought for a short moment, then gestured toward the tablets. “We need to catalogue the capsules on site. I need them classified by their travel worthiness, their general health, and whether or not we are able to put them back in the registry for reassignment on Gallifrey.”

“I see,” she sang out. She looked around the damp, misty swampland that held each capsule within the muddy surface. “Do you have any idea how many capsules are here?”

“In total, there are one-thousand, seven hundred, and fifty-three capsules. All of them in varying states of health, death, and decay.

Her eyes blew wide at that. “I’m sorry, did you say that there’s close to two-thousand here?” Her eyes remained wide as she looked around. 

“There are more capsules here than what still remain in the Gallifreyan registry,” he answered sadly. “Even factoring in the numbers held in the cradles and dry docks of the Black Hole Shipyards, there are still more of them here.”

Rose shot him a look of shock and sadness that mirrored his own. “There were tens of thousands of Capsules when I was on Gallifrey. I know that more were grown to help fight in the war.” She gulped. “How many were lost in the battles, Narvin?”

“Too many to try and count,” he said softly. “Which is why we need to preserve and save as many of them as we can. Retire those that need to be retired. Euthanize those that are in pain and can’t be saved.” He picked up a tablet and handed it to her, and then belatedly realised that with only one arm, she’d be useless at entering any information into it. “Ahh. Yes.”

“I guess I’m not all that much help, yeah?” she admitted with a wry smile. She looked to her brace. “Can’t do much like this.”

“We’ll see,” he answered somewhat gruffly. “Brax assures me that you can prove to be a big help – despite your current physical condition.” He shrugged and walked toward the front most capsule, that was lilted deep to one side, its doors cracked and rusted. 

“Which Brax?” she queried as she followed behind. “Because if it’s _my_ Brax, then it’s questionable, and he probably only said it to keep me out of mischief. If it’s future Brax, then we might actually be onto something.”

Narvin gave her a light smile and a roll in his eyes as he used a push of his rump to shove open the doors of the capsule wide enough for the two of them to enter. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

“Wow to the abrupt change in topic,” she said with a shake in her head and a roll in her eyes. “Gee, when you Time Lords don’t want to answer a question, you’re not really all that shy makin’ sure we know about it, are you?”

The smile he wore in reply to her comment fell quickly as he turned to enter the ship. His breath exhaled long and sympathetically toward the darkened ship that had no hum and no signs of life in it at all. “Oh, Sweetheart,” he muttered under his breath. “I am so sorry.”

“So dark,” Rose said from his rear as she stepped on board behind him.

“She’s gone,” he said sadly. “Our first capsule, and already we have our first loss.” He gulped and activated a switch on an orc in his hand. As it lit up, he tossed it up into the air above them. It hovered in place and lit the entire console room brightly enough that one would have assumed the light came from the ship itself. “Oh, well. We need to log her in the system, anyway. See who her bond-mate was and whether or not her Lord or Lady is one of Braxiatel’s survivors.”

“Are you sure she’s gone?” Rose asked with a walk around the console room. She dragged her fingertips along a railing surrounding the centre console. “And not just low on power?” She turned to lean against the railing and looked at Narvin as he used his tablet to scan a code on the console edge. “There was this one time that me, Mickey, and the Doctor … We ended up on a parallel Earth. The TARDIS, she was messed up bad. Total shutdown of all of her systems.”

“The fact she’s still with the Doctor means she had something left inside her,” he remarked somewhat coolly. “The Doctor would have known that.”

She shook her head. “He thought she was dead,” she continued with a look up at the dark and quiet rotor column of the ship. “He was so upset to think he lost her. So sad.”

“A Time Lord worth his title _would_ be upset at the loss of their capsule,” Narvin commented as he switched between the information on his tablet and the engraved metal plate. “The capsules are more than just a time ship to get them from point a to point b. They’re an extension of their pilot, a partner…”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Rose said to him with a shake of her head in the roll of her eyes. She pointed a finger of warning at him as she strode to a small alcove in the console that allowed her to move close to the rotor column. She touched at it with the flat of her palm. “As I was saying. When the Doctor thought he’d lost the TARDIS, he started to search for anything, any sign that she was still alive and that he could somehow save her.”

Narvin made a sound to indicate that he was listening but continued on his task. 

“Anyway. He found it. A little tiny bit of life left inside her.” She looked back at him with a smile. “A tiny little power cell, still clinging to life.”

“We’re not going to find anything like that here, Rose. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not going to accept that,” she said with a huff. “I’m not. I’m not going to consider this beautiful lady dead until we’ve tried everything.”

“Rose,” he said with an apologetic, yet slightly frustrated huff. “I can’t tell you how incredibly moving it is to me that you’re so empathetic to these ships. Countless Time Lords couldn’t care less about their capsules and the sentience of them, yet you – a _human_ of all things – feel such intense affection for them.”

“How can I not?” she asked. “They’re magnificent creatures.” 

“They are,” he agreed. “But. But with everything, there comes a time where we have to accept that there’s nothing left that can be done. You’ve just got to let go and say good bye.”

She inhaled deeply and drew out a long and slow breath as she turned back to the rotor column. “Well. I’m not givin’ up on this one.”

“Fine,” he muttered. “If it’ll make you feel better, then go right ahead.” He lifted his head to watch her analyse the rotor column. “Please don’t tell me that we’re going to have to go through this discussion for every one of these ships.”

“If I think there’s a chance,” she said as she pressed the flat of her palm to the glass cylinder that held the main rotor engine. “Then yeah, I’ll fight you on it.” With an inhale, she closed her eyes and leaned forward to press her forehead to the glass. “Come on, Sweetheart. I know you’re still in there.”

He shook his head and looked back down at his tablet. “Humans,” he muttered under his breath. “Romantic, whimsical fools.” A shimmer of orange captured his attention and he let his eyes lift from the tablet. His breath caught to see a glimmer of Amber swirling along Rose’s skin. He noisily dropped his tablet onto the console and moved forward to pull her away from the console.

“Don’t touch her,” Braxiatel’s voice boomed in warning from the door of the capsule. “Let her do what needs to be done.”

“What do you mean _don’t touch her_?” he growled with a spin in place. He looked at his elder self and the elder Braxiatel at the doorway with an expression of anger. He thrust his arm backward to point at her. “Look at her.”

“Rose is fine,” Braxiatel said on a low voice. 

“She’s glowing,” Narvin stated, not caring a bit about the obviousness of his vocalised observation. He drew in a long sniff. “ _Glowing_ , Brax.”

“Yes, I can see that, thank you,” he replied drolly. 

Narvin threw up his hands. “Then this is on you if something happens to her,” he said with a huff as he strode backward from the console. He gestured toward there Rose was still talking to the ship, her head and eyes now aglow with the same amber energy. “All yours, Brax. I’m not having any part of this.”

He stalked past his elder self and was caught by her hand curling tightly around his arm. “You really don’t want to miss this,” she warned him.

“Miss what?” he growled into her face. “The death of the Doctor’s mate?” He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “No thank you. I need to find myself an outpost as far out of his reach as I can find.”

“Dramatics don’t become you,” she sneered in reply. “So, don’t.”

His lip curled to retort, but his words were held inside him as the room around them lit up with life. His breath drew in hard and he spun in place with a low gape in his jaw. “What?!” His eyes snapped toward Rose as she gasped, shook herself, then stepped back from the column with a smile. “But this ship was dead!”

Braxiatel smiled. “If you think that was impressive,” he cooed. “Then you wait to see what she’ll do next. Because, Narvin. You haven’t seen anything yet…” 

~~oooOOOooo~~


	45. Closed Off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the elder Braxiatel returns to the encampment with the crew... Narvin's suspicious

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Did I miss a chapter? I'm sure I'm missing something!"
> 
> Yes, I will expect very much that this will be the response to this chapter. There is a big chunk that seems to be missing ... there is a reason for that. Why? You'll find out.
> 
> So... Setting something up of sorts with this chapter. I kind've feel like something exciting has to happen in this story this week.... I need excitement. Rain and gloom is making me miserable. Action and adventure makes me less gloomy and miserable.
> 
> I do hope you enjoy. I only had a very short window of time to write today, so squishy squishy in putting it together. I do hope this chapter brings questions.... See you on the 'morrow.

~~oooOOOooo~~

A bright blue shimmer that started as a mere spark in the air of reality slowly expanded and grew into a large oblong shape. From the centre, a foursome of people strode from one side of reality into another. The two females of the group exited the blue light with amusement on their faces and a laugh in the backs of their throat. Braxiatel and Narvin walked behind them with differing expressions on their handsome faces. Braxiatel projected pride and command, whist Narvin wore a more shell-shocked expression. He carried at his hip a satchel containing tablets and an array of papers. The strap stretched across his chest from shoulder to hip, and he held a hand to the join of the strap and bag tightly as though trying to secure himself to something more tangible than the madness he’d witnessed at the capsule site.

Both men paused at the outer edge of the encampment, whilst the two women made their way across the lavender grasses toward the expanse between lines of Capsules.

“Have you managed to appropriately wrap your mind about what you just saw?” Braxiatel asked after a moment. He didn’t bother turning to face Narvin, preferring to seek out the vision of Romana across the distance instead. “Or do you need a few more centuries to think about it?”

“I am really not sure how to take any of that,” Narvin admitted as he let his mind wander over the previous few hours and the hard _training_ Braxiatel had imposed upon Rose. “Specifically your insistence in … in …”

“In training Rose how to properly control the power within her,” Braxiatel offered when it became clear that Narvin wasn’t quite sure how to properly voice just what it is they were doing. He stopped their slow walk and finally turned toward his old friend. “To protect her, Narvin. That’s all.”

“I don’t know that I believe you, Braxiatel,” he admitted somewhat gravely. “Because it seems to me that you’re pushing for her to control that energy she has to be used as a weapon, much like Rassilon would if he were to get his hands on her.”

“He won’t,” Braxiatel affirmed darkly.

“Don’t be so sure of that,” Narvin corrected. “Despite what happened within your own time stream, this stream is still very much in flux. Anything can happen from here.”

“Then it’s on you, my younger self, and Thete, to make sure Rose is kept out of Rassilon’s path, isn’t it?”

Narvin had to issue a huff of a chuckle through his nose. “And you think that by making Rose think that she has some kind of superpower will keep her out of trouble?” he shook his head. “It will only make her that much more eager to step in where others won’t.”

Braxiatel gave a snort of his own. 

“What you’re doing, Brax, is to make Rose think she’s invincible.” He frowned and shook his head. “Which will only be that much more dangerous to herself …” He exhaled. “To all of us when he have to step in and stop her.”

“It needs to be done,” he breathed out.

“And just how does your brother feel about it?” he questioned with a pointed look. “I can’t help but notice that he’s not here at your side flitting about you like an annoying trunkike during nesting season.”

Braxiatel swallowed thickly. His voice was unusually strained. “He’s… He’s busy with other things right now that takes precedence over this.”

“More precedence than the safety of his mate?” Narvin scoffed. “It insults me that you honestly expect me to believe that.”

“We’re six-hundred years into your future,” Braxiatel said with light warning inside a growl. “Plenty has changed since the days of even that one of you.” He gestured toward the female Narvin who was locked in what looked to be a serious discussion with Jackie Tyler and one of the refugee women. He levered a look toward the man at his side. “As have you, I’ll add.”

Narvin lifted a hand in warning. “Don’t reveal anything,” he growled with frustration. “Really, Braxiatel. This timeline hopping of yours has so many temporally negative connotations to it, that I’m surprised we aren’t swarmed by reapers ready to clean up the mess.”

“Experience,” he muttered in response, choosing to leave it at that.

“Is this our future, then? Hopping about throughout time and changing events to a more acceptable outcome.” He shook his head. “Have we not learned the serious consequences of playing games like this?”

“You mean like starting a war that spanned multiple centuries, obliterated entire worlds, damn near killed ours; despite all of our efforts to prevent it?”

Narvin’s eyes narrowed darkly. “If one must use that as an example, then yes. Just like that.”

“If you had possessed enough trust in Romana and I…”

Narvin interrupted him with a harsh laugh. “Oh, that’s rich. Really it is. You ask me to place _that_ much trust in the two of you?”

“Romana had it all in hand,” he reminded him. “She had very effectively countered off the risk of war against the Daleks before you chose to act. It was you, and your impetuousness that set in motion the sequence of events that started that war.” He swallowed and took a look around at the encampment laid out in front of them. “Had you trusted her, Narvin. If you’d been able to set aside your incessant mistrust in all creatures around you and just placed _some_ belief in her, then we wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m conditioned toward mistrust,” he admitted quietly.

“And that never changes,” he said with a sigh. “No matter your incarnation, your inability to trust those closest to you never diminishes.”

He gestured toward his female self. “I seem to trust well enough in that particular incarnation.”

Braxiatel snorted. “Hardly.” He blinked. “You are more open to friendship and comradery, but to trust?” He shook his head. “No. You don’t do anything with, nor for, anyone without deeply investigating the temporal legitimacy of it.”

“So, to ask me to trust you now?”

Braxiatel drew in a breath as his smile faltered just slightly. “All I can do is ask it of you,” he admitted. “For Romana, and for Rose.”

Narvin turned to one side to face Braxiatel directly. There was an expression of stern curiosity inside his glare. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing,” he grumped.

“That’s woprat excrement, and you know it,” he snarled in reply. “Don’t think it hasn’t escaped my notice that you’ve been on Estrail now for several weeks without a return to Gallifrey.” His eyes flicked briefly toward Rose and then back to Braxiatel. “Weeks that look to span into months as we work these final moments toward civil uprising against Rassilon.”

“Hardly an unusual thing for me to do,” Braxiatel said with a sniff. “I’ve spent plenty of time – and great spans of time – away from Gallifrey throughout my lives.”

“Not since becoming mated with Romana,” Narvin noted with a pinch in his eye.

“Just a few months ago in your current time stream I did just that,” he defended. “Spent quite some time away from my mate…”

“A self-imposed exile,” Narvin reminded him. “Because you were at war with your mate.”

“Not at war with her,” he corrected. “I had some things that I needed to do, and I didn’t need a mate looking over my shoulder with her judgmental huffs and sighs…”

“And the fact you refer to Romana in such a manner leaves me with so many questions,” Narvin said with definite worry in his tone. “What has happened in your timeline, Brax?”

“Our hearts beat just as strongly for each other now as they ever have,” he answered softly. “Romana is – and always will be – my entire universe. There is nothing in all of reality that I wouldn’t do for her.”

“Except be honest,” Narvin remarked with a pinch in his eye and suspicion in his tone. “That is something you’ve always struggled with.” He turned back toward the group, which now consisted of the lovely Romana herself, a babe on her hip and a glint of something brilliant and yet unusual in her eye. “Which is something that I’ve admittedly never understood about the pair of you. Your affection and dedication toward her is legend. Yet, you hide from her more than you do anyone.”

“Perhaps because I understand just how unworthy of her I truly am,” he breathed out. The look he sent across the lavender grasses toward the much younger incarnation of his wife was one of longing and desperation. “She is truly a remarkable creature, Narvin. One created inside the Heavens. How a pathetic fool like me was able to make her the other half of my soul, I will never understand.”

Narvin inhaled a breath and waited for Braxiatel to issue some form of threat not to tell anyone he’d made that admittance. It never came, and that was concerning.

“What’s going on, Brax?” he asked quietly. “And how can I help?”

“You can’t,” he admitted on a whisper. 

“I’m sorry?”

Braxiatel sniffed in deeply and then cleared his throat. Any weakness he had in his frame was quickly straightened out and waved off with a lift of his chin. “There’s nothing you can help with, because there is nothing I need help with.” He blinked his eyes. “That will end this discussion if you will. No more to be said.”

“If you say so,” Narvin said with a side-eyed look toward Braxiatel. “However, the line of discussion regarding Rose and what your intentions are based upon the work you did with her today is far from put to bed.”

Braxitel nodded slowly. “You must admit that the work we did today served more than just my own purpose.” He looked to one side to regard Narvin with a side-glance. “She revived several of your capsules to such a degree that each one of them can be put straight back into the registry.”

“I need to work through your own data to determine whether or not their bonded Time Lords are part of your survivor stream before I can add them to any registry.” He exhaled a long breath. “And then it becomes imperative for me to create a viable and believable story to explain how and where I was able to find a non-bonded capsule to add to the CIA registry.”

“I figured you would have a separate registry…”

“I’m not you,” Narvin growled low. “Unlike you, I simply don’t have the energy to live and breathe a life of lies and deceit. How you keep each one of them so perfectly straight in your mind is as astounding as it is terrifying.” He exhaled a long breath. “As it is, my repeated absences from Gallifrey are drawing questions from around the Capitol.”

“And what are you telling them?”

“That the CIA movements are my business and not theirs.” He exhaled. “And unless they are of the mind to spend a few hours explaining to me their roles within the Time Lord Society and what their purpose is aside from extreme pompousness, then I don’t have the time nor the crayons to explain my place in society to them.”

“Eloquent.”

“Hardly.” He drew in a breath. “Although there will come a point where I’m going to have to fabricate something viable. Rassilon won’t be blind to my movements forever.” He exhaled. “He’ll be walking in my office demanding answers sooner rather than later, and I’m afraid not even a fully functioning Time Ring will get me far enough away from him.”

“You can step away if you wish,” he offered quietly with a look back toward the grouping, and to Romana showing off her youngster to a pair of gushing Gallifreyan women. His breath drew in shakily and he swallowed. “I’ll understand, as will all of them.”

Narvin looked at the expression on the face of his friend as he looked across the lawns toward his wife. There was clear heartsbreak within him. He stepped around Braxiatel to stand in the sightline between he and his wife. “Where’s your brother?”

He snapped a sharp look toward him. “I’m sorry?”

“Where is he; the Doctor?”

“Why would his whereabouts be an issue?” He let out a breath. “And as I said to you earlier, he’s busy with other things right now.”

“Such as?”

“Really none of your concern,” he huffed out. “Thete has his own life, his own commitments. What he’s doing right now is of no consequence to now.”

“Again, I don’t believe you,” he growled. “You’re here, with Rose, doing things I can’t imagine he’d approve of in any way…”

“Actually, he does, thank you,” Braxiatel snapped in reply. 

“ _Really_?” he asked with a smile on his face. “Then let’s go ask him, shall we? Let’s go check in with her husband and see what level of approval he’d grant you...”

“Don’t even think about it,” he snarled. “ _This_ Thete might not approve of it, all things considered, but the one in my current timeline most certainly does.”

“Then do this with your current Rose,” he challenged. “Not this one.”

“I can’t,” he admitted on a whisper.

“And why not?” he asked with a look toward the group, where the younger Braxiatel had taken hold of young Clara and was flying her through the air with swooping, playful movements through the air. Romana stood at his side, her hands on her mouth and a smile stretched across her cheeks as she watched them play.

Braxiatel sniffed wetly at his side. There was clear emotion in his voice when he responded. “I just can’t.”

Narvin turned quickly toward his old friend. His breath hitched to see his eyes reddening, full of tears. His entire demeanour fell toward worry. “Brax? What’s going on?”

“Please stop asking,” he requested after a deep sniff and hard swallow to try and school himself into his typical stoic posture. “It’s not relevant to your timeline, nor to your upcoming fight against Rassilon.”

“If it blinds you to the safety of Rose, and to everyone here, then it’s very relevant,” he argued lightly. “Are you here to change the course of the timelines, or are you preserving a causal loop?”

“Isn’t that a good question?” he asked bluntly.

“One that needs an answer.”

Braxiatel exhaled. “This time is flowing in the exact same manner as it did when this timeline was mine.” He swallowed and closed his eyes. “I could change it for my own gain, Narvin, and trust me when I say that I’ve considered it more than once. But let me assure you that I haven’t.” He blinked and looked toward Romana, who now had her eyes set firmly on the two of them. “Despite my desire to corrupt the lines to soothe the ache in my hearts.”

Narvin’s face fell. His shoulders fell as well with horrific realisation. “By the Gods, Brax. Romana, is she…?”

“We don’t know,” he answered flatly. “But after a decade of searching, we can only assume that the both of them are.”

“Both?” he gasped out. His eyes flicked to Rose, who was sequestered inside the embrace of her husband, and then to Romana, who was making her way across to them. “As in Romana _and_ Rose?”

“Romana!” Braxiatel called out with booming happiness inside his tone. “Don’t you look absolutely breathtaking today?”

Her eyes narrowed as she drew closer to them. “A greeting of that nature, Brax, leads me to believe that you have engaged yourself in activities that I would not approve of.” She gave a smile to Narvin and nodded her head lightly in greeting. “And involving others in your mischief as well?”

“I like to think I’d be counted upon to put a stop to any and all nefarious activities of a Braxiatel nature,” Narvin countered with a smirk on his lip. “Rather than a collaborator to it.”

“I’d like to think any of us could,” she said with a sigh and a look toward her husband. “But one cannot tame Gallifrey’s most wild of beasts, no matter how hard they try.”

Braxiatel stepped forward and quickly thread an arm across her shoulder. With a fast drop of his shoulder and a ben of his knee, he had her dipped lightly backward, his mouth hovering less than an inch over hers. “My dear Romana, don’t ever discount your ability to have me obediently awaiting your every command.” He dropped his mouth to hers to sear a soul-scorching kiss against her mouth. He released her with a light pop and smiled against her lips. “Because your wish is very much my command.”

She looked up at him with pinking cheeks and a forced look of chiding in her eyes. “Then do I start by asking you to release and allow me to stand, Braxiatel?” She blinked slowly with eyes that held as much bedroom within them as they did command. “You know my thoughts about spending time in the presence of any individual quite clearly standing outside of their own timeline.”

“Even your own mate?” he questioned with a kiss at the tip of her nose.

She clutched his arm to hoist herself upward and to a straightened stand. “ _Especially_ my own mate.” She straightened her pastel blue tunic top and slid her eyes toward Narvin. “How did things go today with the capsules? Were there more survivors than decedents among the group.”

“We only lost three, all counted,” Braxiatel answered for his friend. 

There was a smile on his face and a look of sheer and unadulterated adoration on his face toward his wife. Enough that she started to shrink lightly from it. “Only three?” she asked with the smallest of steps away from him. “I thought we’d lost so many more than that.”

Narvin gave Braxiatel a look of question as to how he’d drawn such a definite figure. They hadn’t exactly done a lot of actual cataloguing of the abandoned crafts, so such a figure was a tall stretch to say the very least.

“Many were simply in restorative stasis conditions,” Braxiatel offered. “The injuries of many were quite severe, but survivable for the most part.” A smile spread across his face. “Plenty of songs sung in the key of hum across the swamplands this evening, I assure you.”

“that is very good to hear,” she said with a sigh of happiness. “To know that we have so many more survivors makes me feel like we have hope.”

“We have so much more than that,” he offered. 

“Purpose,” she agreed with a nod of her head. “And a true path forward. Always better than hope alone.”

He lifted a hand to cup at her cheek. “My hearts,” he breathed out with a light pinch in between his brows.

Romana took his hand from her face and held it a moment. There was an expression of question and concern in her eyes when she looked up at him. “Are you alright, Irving?”

“When I am in your presence, Romana, I am _always_ alright.”

Her brows came together in concern, but she dared not push him any further. Instead she gave him a smile and gestured toward encampment. “Evening falls once again, gentlemen. There is a celebration planned for this evening. A bonfire, I’m told.” She looked toward the large pit that was filled with woof gathered from the surrounding forest. “I expect tight supervision will be required.”

“For the youngsters?” Narvin asked with a light smile.

“I only wish,” she said with a light sigh. “I’m afraid, however, the supervision required will be one geared toward the supposed adults of our group.” A smile did cross her lips and a light chuckle escaped her chest. “I encourage the both of you to join us – if you don’t have anything better to do.”

“I will consider it, my Lady,” Braxiatel answered with a nod of his head in a bow more appropriate for the halls of the Capitol than a husband speaking with his wife.

“I will hope so,” she said with a smile. Her eyes shifted toward the other gentleman. “Narvin, if you wouldn’t mind coming with me. Phiroi received word from Gallifrey that I’d like for you to take a look at.”

“Of course, Romana,” he replied with an obedient air to him. He looked toward Braxiatel with a pinch in his eye that was warning that their discussion was far from over. “I will see you later, Lord Cardinal,” he said almost facetiously.

Braxiatel wore a smile on his face, but as he watched them leave the smile fell fast. “I haven’t been Cardinal for centuries,” he corrected under his breath. 

He turned to leave the scene and retire into his own capsule parked almost a full kilometre away from the encampment. The quickly fading sunlight meant that he should move quickly if he hoped not to have to fumble in the darkness. A ripple in the reality that surrounded him made him close his eyes and hitch in a deep breath. 

“Lord President,” a voice greeted dryly from behind him as the warp in reality slowly mended itself.

“And hello to you as well,” he muttered in facetious reply over his shoulder. His head tilted when he sensed that the single presence behind him was actually the presence of two people. He turned slowly to look at them both and exhaled a deep breath when their identities became clear. They were Time Lords; unmistakably so. One of them CIA. Well, this was the harbinger of bad tidings, wasn’t it? Not wishing to show defeat or worry, he forced one side of his mouth to lift in a half-smile. “I wondered how long it would be until _you_ arrived.”


	46. Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Braxiatel deals with his visitors ... and isn't all that thrilled with their presence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying real hard to get to a specific scene ... of which all this is leading....
> 
> So, yes.... method to my madness and reason for everything I do.
> 
> Incredible kind of sappiness in here, just a fair warning... Close to cringey, but I admit that.... But there is, as always, a reason for it.
> 
> I hope that you enjoy this, I really do.

~~oooOOOooo~~

At first glance, Braxiatel couldn’t immediately identify either man that stood to his rear. One was dressed in a rather odd combination of business and casual. Blue jeans-like trousers, fitted, straight leg, topped with a brown single-breasted waistcoat that was just as closely fitted to his form as his trousers were. A white tailored shirt, blue tie to match his trousers, and a grey Glen Check blazer finished the ensemble…

The other man, clearly younger, was dressed in the thigh-length black and white tunic and black trouser combination favoured by CIA field agents. He was a handsome young fellow with dark hair and searing blue eyes. He had his jaw carpeted with short and neatly manicured scruff. 

After a moment of brief analysis, their identities became clear.

“I wondered just how long it would be until _you_ arrived,” he said with a light huff directed toward the elder of the two men.

“No sense in you having all the fun,” the Doctor muttered dryly, his eyes flicking up over Braxiatel’s shoulder to look toward the encampment. 

Braxiatel understood just who his brother’s eyes sought out. He shook his head slowly. “Don’t do that to yourself, Thete. It’s really for the best you stay as far from her as you can.” His eyes flicked toward a tall young man wearing a CIA uniform standing at the Doctor’s side. “Jason,” he greeted warmly. 

“Father,” the young man answered.

They stood in silence for a moment merely looking toward each other with neutral expressions. In a simultaneous moment, however, both father and son broke position and came together in a firm embrace of both greeting and genuine affection.

“You’ve regenerated,” Braxiatel noted with a lightening of his hold, but without releasing his son entirely. His eyes flicked toward his brother. “As have you.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor answered with a rub at the back of his neck. “Incident on Cuutiks. Invasion of the Qhaids that didn’t exactly follow the path of … well … least resistance.”

“He got a blaster shot to the chest,” Jason said with a wince as he pulled back from his father to fall back into a relaxed, yet on guard, posture beside his uncle. “Me? Well. Acting as a protector to a young Trazek didn’t quite go in my favour.”

“Was the Trazek saved?”

“She was,” he replied with a light smile. “And was far more capable than I gave her credit for. While I was laid out waiting for regeneration to take hold, she took out all five Quhaidish soldiers.”

“Sometimes, Jase, you really do have to take a step back,” Braxiatel said with a shrug in his shoulder. “The female Trazek are a formidable opponent – much moreso than their male counterparts.”

“So I learned.” His mouth tipped up into a smile. “I intend on writing a paper on the experience to have this information integrated into the Academy curriculum regarding the inhabitants of Cuutiks.”

“So much like your mother,” Braxiatel breathed in awe. “She’d have done the same.”

“I know,” he agreed softly.

Braxiatel looked toward his brother. “And speaking of…?”

The Doctor shook his head slowly. “Still no luck, I’m afraid. I’ve had the TARDIS endlessly scanning the entire universe for their signatures. I’ve lowered the search parameters to any Time Lord bioscan physiology.”

“All that seems to yield are the basic renegade or exiled Time Lords and Ladies exploring the universe,” Jason said sadly. “And not too many of them provide a pleasurable greeting, let me tell you.”

Braxiatel nodded. “You don’t need to tell me.” He drew in a deep breath and looked up to the darkening sky above. “There really is only one viable conclusion to be drawn from this…”

“They aren’t dead,” the Doctor snarled under his breath. “I won’t accept that for either of them.”

“Thete…”

“I won’t,” he repeated. He tapped at his temple, then petted his hand between his hearts. “I still feel her, Brax. Right here.” He kept his hand on his chest but lowered his head to look at the ground. “They’re still beating, Brax.” He lifted his head. “And while they do, I won’t give up searching for her. Even if it takes me to the end of my lives, I _will_ keep searching.” There was a sheen across his eyes and a croak in his voice. “I’m not giving up on the both of them. I can’t. I won’t.”

Braxiatel let out a long breath of his own. There was a brief moment where he closed his eyes to tamp down his own emotion, but it was brief. He fought against the instinct to provide comfort but faltered quickly when his brother choked back an emotional gulp. He quickly stepped forward and snapped his arms around the Doctor’s arms and shoulders. It surprised him when the Doctor’s arms came up to complete the embrace.

“If you won’t give up, then neither will I,” he vowed through his teeth into the Doctor’s ear. “Whatever you need, whatever my office can provide you. You know you have it.”

“Speaking of,” Jason interrupted with a straight voice. “When are you planning on returning to Gallifrey?”

Braxiatel sighed hard as he stepped back from the Doctor and looked toward his son. “Soon.” He looked toward the encampment. “I’m not quite finished here.”

“Best you return sooner, rather than later,” Jason warned him. “There is unrest at the Capitol, and whispers of you being unsuitable for Presidency.”

“Quite likely because I am,” he admitted with a light growl. “But I accepted the title in the hope that I can hand over the sash to your mother when she returns.” He swallowed. “She shouldn’t have to fight though the election process to reclaim what is already hers.”

“It’s been years,” he reminded him. “And with you being off planet so often…”

“I still lead them,” he replied sharply. “The whole pompous lot of them. My ability to reside over Gallifrey is not diminished in any way by my being away. Especially when my work off planet directly benefits our people.” He gestured to the encampment. “Case in point.”

The Doctor stepped in between the two of them to look upon the movements across the fields. A small smile ticked at the very edges of his mouth as he remembered his time on Estrail. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Is this the night of the bonfire?” he looked back to his brother. “The celebration of their freedom from London?”

“One step closer to reclaiming Gallifrey,” Braxiatel confirmed with a nod of his head. “Yes. They arrived on Estrail yesterday.”

“I remember this night,” he breathed out longingly. “All of us together, relaxed, enjoying the music and stories of our people. The dancing. The singing…”

“The copious amounts of Magenta wine that we threw back,” Braxiatel added with a smile. He stepped up to stand beside his brother and watched the people move through their final preparations for the event. “Cleaned out both my capsule and your TARDIS of it, didn’t we?”

“We did,” he answered with a wide smile. His smile faltered when he saw the younger version of his wife, her arm braced inside a sling, dancing with their young daughter. She laughed with a joyous sound that swept across the grasses when his younger self cut in, picked up the little girl in his arms, and waltzed around a small, yapping wolf cub. “One of our very rare moments when we forgot about the weight of the universe pressing down on our shoulders, and just let ourselves be … _happy_ …”

Braxiatel slid a look toward his brother. He didn’t need to see the man move to know exactly what was on his mind. Before the Doctor had shifted a single muscle, Braxiatel snapped the back of his hand to rest against his belly in an order for him to stop.

“I wouldn’t,” he recommended firmly.

“I need to,” the Doctor countered with light desperation in his tone. “Just a moment, a small touch…”

“Trust me when I tell you it’s worse for you to get that light bit of contact than it is to have none at all.”

The Doctor looked to his brother. “Says the one who has probably already spent time with his wife. Who has already achieved connection…”

“And I’m worse for it,” he answered with a sneer in his voice. “My need for her has gone from a dull ache into a full blown inferno of raging desire.” He sniffed in deeply. “It’s taking every single ounce of control I have not to storm that encampment and take her from my younger self.”

“My control has never been that strong,” the Doctor admitted. “Not when it comes to Rose. You know that.”

Jason sighed at his side – opposite to his father. “Nor have you been particularly opposed to taking her from another incarnation of yours.” He looked to him. “Which, really, is what put you on this journey to begin with.”

Braxiatel nodded in agreement. “Which is precisely why we cannot allow you near her, Thete. I can’t trust you.”

The Doctor looked across the field with an expression of longing. “Just one touch?” he asked weakly. “Just one. Please?”

Across the field, Rose lifted her head. She gave a slow turn in place to look toward the trio. There was an expression of question on her face, a pinch in her brow and a light dip in her chin.

“Oh, great,” Braxiatel moaned. “You had to put it across you bond, didn’t you?” He held up a hand toward Rose, a stop sign gesture. One she clearly ignored as she slowly strolled toward them. He couldn’t help but moan out. “Of course she’d ignore me.”

At his side, the Doctor smiled reverently. “Just give me this moment, Brax. Just one.”

“It’s not like I have the choice now, is it?” He folded his arms across his chest and put on his best expression of disappointment and frustration. That look he levered across to Rose, who merely smiled facetiously in reply. “Don’t say a word about what’s happening in our timeline right now,” he warned. “Not a word. As far as she knows, we are all happy and still very much together.”

“Yes,” the Doctor breathed out almost urgently. “Yes, of course.” 

Rose approached the group with her smile still in place. She shared a look with Braxiatel, then looked toward the other pair in the group, none of whom she immediately recognised. She lifted her hand to scoop her hair from her lip gloss and hook it behind her ear. “Hello,” she breathed out with friendly greeting.

“Rose,” the Doctor breathed out with awe and longing. “You look … _beautiful_.”

Her eyes widened with surprise. “Doctor?”

“The one and only,” he answered with a wink in his eye. “Well,” he drawled. “One of thirteen, I suppose I should say.”

“You’ve regenerated?” Her smile fell. “How? How far into the future?” She looked to Braxiatel. “Same as you?”

“Six hundred years from now,” the Doctor answered, wanting to keep her attention rather than losing it to his brother. He smiled when she gasped and looked back to him with wide eyes and a gaped mouth. He couldn’t help but reach out to cup her cheek in his hand. “And yes, before you ask, my hearts still beat for you as they always have.”

She held her hand over his and leaned into his touch. She closed her eyes and let out a contended sigh as she felt his mind brush up against hers. “There you are…”

He looked to her shoulder and exhaled a discomforted sound. “Oh my Hearts,” he breathed out. “I can’t believe I had to leave you like this.”

“I’m okay,” she said with a chuckle. “You also left me with some really potent pain drugs to dull it to almost bearable.” Her eyes shifted toward the other man in the group. She stepped out of the Doctor’s hold and smiled widely. “Narvin? Back to bein’ a bloke, then?”

“I’m not Narvin,” he answered with a light smile and a chuckle in his tone. He thumbed over his shoulder. “He’s back on Gallifrey working on a couple of things, putting out a few fires, setting a few more.” He waggled his fingers in greeting. “Hello Tonzarina Rose. I’m Jasondrurathusamia. Third eldest of the old man here.” He gestured toward Braxiatel. “You call me Jase.”

Rose blinked with surprise. “Well, hello, Jase. Lovely to …ehm … meet you for the first time.” She looked at him, then to Braxiatel, back to Jason, then to Braxiatel once more. “He’s _yours_?” a wide smile stretched across her face. “Yours and _Romana’s_?”

Braxiatel rolled his eyes. “You already know that Romana and I are in the process of creating a life together.” His eyes shifted across the grasses ahead. “In fact, by this moment inside your timeline, Romana is already expecting. Although early days, so please don’t squeal too loudly and alert the entire encampment to something being awry in their world.”

Rose couldn’t help but squeak out excitedly. “How can I not?” She skipped to him, throwing her good arm around his shoulders. “I’m so happy for you, Brax! Congratulations.”

He held her loosely against his chest and sighed happily. “Thank you.”

“Three of them though,” she gushed out happily. “Well done in outdoing me and the Doctor, yeah?”

“Who says we haven’t had any more?” the Doctor asked her with a sly smile. His smile fell and he looked to his brother. “Now if you wouldn’t mind…” He held out his hand to Rose. “May I?”

“You may not,” Braxiatel said with a sniff and a lift in his chin. “Rose really should return to the group, as in _her_ group within _her_ timeline.”

“Already?” he asked with as little a whine in his voice as possible.

“Why don’t you join us?” she asked with a wide smile. “Plenty of room, and it looks like it’s going to be an incredible evening.” She put on her most pleading of expressions. “Brax has magenta wine in his capsule that he’s willing to share.”

“Do I?” Braxiatel asked with an indignant sniff. “I can’t imagine being willing to share what little is left of the Magenta Orchard winery with _that_ motley crew – particularly when that group includes not one, but _two_ incarnations of Narvin.”

“Romana asked you really _really_ nicely,” Rose challenged him with a smirk.

“If I recall it correctly,” Braxiatel muttered with a sniff. “She didn’t ask so much as order me to open my crates.”

“And we both know that Romana’s wish …?”

“Is my honoured command,” he answered with a smile and a light bow. “Yes, Rose. I know. I do recall the events of this evening, thank you.”

“So, it went well, then?”

“It did for me,” the Doctor said with a purr in his voice. He curled a hand around her hip and drew her close. He pressed his forehead to hers and drew his fingertips down along her jaw. “The love we made tonight is something I’ve never forgotten. It remains one of my most treasured memories.”

Her brows pinched. She was used to affection and tender words from him, but this seemed a little on the odd side, even for him. “Doctor?” she questioned lightly. “Is everything okay? Are _you_ okay?”

“You’re in my arms and in my mind,” he answered on a whisper. He lifted her hand to hold against his chest. “Feel my hearts beating for you inside my chest. How can I _not_ be okay?”

She hummed a sound that indicated she wasn’t quite sure about that. She chose not to press right now, rather she felt she might wait until she could corner Braxiatel tomorrow at the capsule yard. Perhaps she’ll bring Romana along with her – give him a double-barrel shot that he couldn’t escape from. 

Without thought, she rolled up onto her toes and pressed her mouth lightly to his. “I love you,” she vowed fiercely against his mouth before pulling away entirely. “You know that, yeah?”

His hand hooked around the back of her head and he pulled her down for a harder, more intense kiss. One arm hooked tightly across her back, the other buried deeply within her hair. The kiss may have lacked the class of the one shared by Braxiatel and Romana earlier, but it certainly shared the same passion and desperation. He whimpered almost pathetically inside her mouth rather than the impassioned growl he would usually emit, and it made Rose stagger back from him just lightly. “Doctor,” she pleaded with one hand against his chest to hold him back. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“You’re in pain,” he lied quickly. “And I can’t bear it.”

“I’m okay,” she assured him. “I promise you.”

His eyes were on the buckle that held her arm up at her shoulder. With a purse in his lips, he picked up a hand to carefully undo it. “I can make it better,” he assured her.

Her eyes widened at the sudden release of the buckle, and of the sudden freedom of movement in her arm. She felt immediate and very alarming pain in her shoulder as a result. His name passed through her lips with panic.

“Shhh,” he hushed with a gentle hiss between his teeth. “Trust me. I’m a Doctor.”

She shot a look of pure worry toward Braxiatel and mouthed a single word of confusion toward him. All her brother in law could do was close his eyes and shake his head apologetically.

The Doctor’s eyes were focused on the movement of her shoulder as he carefully levered her arm so that it lay straight at her side. He then ran his hand down along the length of her arm and stepped forward to press his chest up against hers. “Close your eyes,” he breathed out tenderly with a lower of his head toward her shoulder. “Please.”

She did as he instructed and bit at her lower lip as she closed her eyes. She drew in a deep breath that held deeply when she felt a light huff of breath against the bare skin of her shoulder. His breath was far warmer than she was used to. And even though the chilly breeze was now a warm wind, she felt a shudder run the full length down her spine. When his lips touched at her skin, she actually whimpered out a strangled sound and curled her other arm around his back to hold him in place against her.

A shift inside her mind muted the sounds of the reality that surrounded her. Somewhere she thought she heard the sound of disapproval from Braxiatel, and an uncomfortable moan from young Jason. But all of that really did just seem to make the Doctor far more focused in his task. More focused against her skin, and definitely more focused inside her mind as he reached inside parts of her that till now had been untouched. Pain shifted toward extreme pleasure that took hold of her completely. She shuddered and whimpered and almost lost herself completely inside the majesty of it until she heard the smallest of voices enter her mind. 

“Papa? What’re you doing?”

Immediately the sense of euphoria inside her mind collapsed into emptiness. Rose shuddered one last time inside the Doctor’s hold and slowly opened her eyes. 

“I’m kissing mummy’s boo-boo,” the Doctor answered their daughter in a gentle tone. “Making it better.”

“A magic kiss?” Alirra asked curiously.

Rose looked toward her shoulder, which held a slight amber shimmer to it that was quickly dissipating toward normal. She looked back to the Doctor, swaying just slightly when he released her to drop into a crouch in front of his daughter.

“Very magic, darling,” he answered softly. 

“Is mummy better now?”

“I very much hope so,” he answered. He looked up to Rose towering above him. He smiled at the rightness of it, how it made so much sense to him that she should be elevated so high above him. “Are you better, Mummy?”

She was able to roll her shoulder without so much as a twinge of pain. A look of confusion crossed her face and she looked across to Braxiatel, who simply appeared annoyed. “What the…?”

“Regeneration energy,” he answered gruffly. “Probably gave you fifty years of his life by doing that.”

The Doctor shook his head and slowly drew himself to a stand. “Actually no. I’m within fifteen hours of regeneration, I have plenty of healing energy to spare.” He thread his hand into Rose’s hair to cup at her cheek. The look he gave her was one of complete adoration. “But even if I did give you fifty years, Rose, it would be worth it.”

She held his hand and returned his look with one just as besotted. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“I think that’s about enough,” Braxiatel growled out low. “Thete, before you shatter this timeline completely, I think you should let Rose and Aly return to the group.”

“Not yet,” he whispered with a lean forward to press a kiss against her mouth, the tip of her nose, and then the centre of her brow. “Just a few more minutes?”

“Now,” Braxiatel demanded. His demanding voice fell quickly toward tender with a look down at his niece. “Aly, darling. I think you and your mother should go back to the group. Isn’t it getting close to your bedtime?”

Alirra yawned widely while she nodded. She stretched her little arms up high over her head and squeaked a long sound. “Time for night-night,” she agreed. She rubbed at her eye with a fist, then pressed her hands onto her father’s thigh. She rolled up onto her toes and puckered out her tiny red lips for a kiss. He acquiesced quickly, dropping to a crouch to give her a kiss against her temple and a tight cuddle. She did the same with her uncle, then yawned widely once more as she held up her hand to her mother. “Sleepy mum.”

“Okay, baby,” Rose cooed in reply as she took her daughter’s hand. She turned to leave, but paused to look back at the trio. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

Braxiatel gave a firm nod of his head. “Of course,” he replied with a light tip of a bow in his head. “Now. Sleep well. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Rose’s eyes shifted to the Doctor. “And you?”

“My hearts beat for you,” he replied with a smile. 

“That’s not what I was asking,” she chided gently. There was a light shake in her head, though, and she gave him a small smile. “But I love you, too, Doctor. Thank you,” she looked to her shoulder. “For fixing it. Twice now.”

“My pleasure,” he said with a smile. A smile he held onto until she turned and walked back to the group. Once out of earshot, his smile fell and he hissed out through his teeth a groan of pain. He clutched at his shoulder. “Well. I say pleasure, but what I really mean to say is… owwww.”

“You’re an idiot,” Braxiatel growled hotly. “an insufferable, irresponsible, remarkable dimwitted idiot.”

“Give him a break, Father,” Jason asked tiredly. “He is grieving right now the loss of his mate.”

“And I’m not?” Braxiatel barked back angrily. “I’ve lost my mate as well. I’m in just as much pain as he is, but do you see me rushing in to do something so blind and foolish as what he just did?” He shifted his eyes to his brother. “And don’t pretend you’re innocent and tell me that I didn’t just witness what you were trying to do with her.”

“Which was _what_?” the Doctor snarled.

“Intimate telepathic connection,” he seethed through his teeth. “Not only remarkably insensitive and inconsiderate to Jason and I having to bear witness, but completely unnecessary for the _procedure_ you just performed on her.”

“Yeah, I will have to side with my father on that one,” Jason offered with a shrug. “Not something I needed to see, thanks.”

“I need the connection,” the Doctor growled through his teeth. His hand was up against his shoulder and there was a sizeable wince on his face. “It’s been fifteen days shy of ten years since I saw her last. I miss her, Brax. I _need_ her. Don’t you understand that?”

“Yes, I do understand, funnily enough. But unlike you, I don’t let that need drive me places I shouldn’t go.” Braxiatel let his eyes fall to his brother’s shoulder and he shook his head. “I can’t believe you took on her pain like that. I’ll repeat, you’re an idiot.”

“It’ll hurt me much less time that it would her,” he defended. “Couple of hours for me, couple of weeks for her. No brainer.”

“If you say so,” he said with a light sigh. “Well. Best you come to my Capsule, then. The two of you can show me what you’ve got so far, and we’ll see if fresh eyes can make additional sense of your current findings. I also have a few high-powered painkillers that might help you get through the next couple of hours.” He glanced across to his son. “Are you able to hang around for a few days, Jason? I might have a task or two I need your help with.”

“Might?” Jason asked. “Or _do_?”

“Do,” he clarified with a lift of his eyes to the sky. 

“I came in my own capsule, so yes. I think I can stick around for a couple of days.” He scratched at his sideburn. “Though I will have to let the Coordinator know. He’s expecting me back for staser refinement target training in the morning.”

“You can reach him from my capsule. Tell old Narvin that you’re acting under Presidential Order until further notice.”

“Somehow,” Jason breathed out with a smile. “I don’t think that’s going to work all that well with him. He knows you better than that.”

“That he does, Jase. That he does.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Rose tried not to look back over her shoulder at the older incarnation of her family. She deliberately bit at her lip and took deep breaths to fight against her instinct to run back to them. Something was wrong, and horrifically so…

…She could only draw one conclusion to it, and while she understood that after six-hundred years, she most likely would have passed on and left him alone, she really didn’t want to believe it was the case. That would mean accepting her own mortality, and she wasn’t prepared to do that just yet…

“Rose,” Romana’s voice called softly from in front of Braxiatel’s capsule. “Do you have a minute?”

“I just have to get Aly to bed,” she answered her with a weak smile. “Can you give about a half hour to get her settled?”

“I’ve got her,” Jackie assured with a magical-like appearance to her right. She stooped to pick up the fast-fading youngster and held her on her hip. “Missed too many bedtime cuddles and stories with this one. Happy to make up for lost time.”

“If you’re sure,” Rose said with an apologetic smile.

“Half tempted to fall asleep with her,” Jackie offered with a coo to the young girl. “Is Aly-monkey okay if Nanna Jackie crashes with her.”

“Sleepover!” Aly answered with a brightening in her eyes. “Mama, please?”

Rose leaned forward to kiss her daughter’s forehead. “Be good for Nanna, yeah? I love you, baby.”

“In my heart, Mum,” she replied with a smile. Almost immediately her attention on her mother fell away to be given entirely to her eager grandmother.

Rose watched with wide eyes and a light smile on her face. “Such fickle little hearts,” she said with a sigh.

“You and the Doctor will always hold the most prominent space within her hearts,” Romana assured her as she stepped to her side and watched Jackie and Alirra walk toward the TARDIS. “But your little girl certainly does love the attention of others, doesn’t she?”

“Little madam,” Rose agreed with a laugh. She then looked to Romana. “So? You wanted to talk to me?”

Romana let out a long and displeased breath. “I couldn’t help but notice you interacting with the elder incarnation of my husband.” At Rose’s small sound of agreement, she swallowed. “And I will assume that was also the future of the Doctor and Narvin as well?”

“The Doctor, yes,” Rose agreed with a light nod. “But that young man is not Narvin.”

“A new companion?”

“That would mean he’s travelling again,” Rose said softly. She exhaled. “But no, not a companion. He’s family.”

“Your son?”

“Best you don’t ask,” Rose said with a slight smile on her face. “As I do know how much you despise knowing about future timelines.”

Romana’s eyes flashed as wide as her mouth did. She felt her heartsbeat increase as her gaze shifted quickly toward where the three man had been standing only moments earlier. To her surprise, they were already gone. “We have…?”

Rose turned to the side to face her friend. Romana wanted to talk, and Rose felt she knew what it was about. “Something’s not right,” she blurted out quickly. “With either of them.”

Romana’s smile fell quickly toward business. “You noticed as well, I see.” She set her hands on her hips and licked at her lip as her eyes looked off into the distance. “Braxiatel is hiding something, and it’s something that has be worried. Very much so.”

“So is the Doctor,” Rose admitted. She exhaled. “I mean, he’s always been a bit of a romantic, I s’pose. Not really all that scared to say how he feels … except when … well…?”

“When under the influence of one Bad Wolf,” Romana supplied. “Yes, I know.”

“But how he was just now?” She shook her head. “It was extreme, even for him.”

Romana nodded. “Brax was the same.”

“And that’s terrifying,” Rose admitted. “He. He acted like he hadn’t seen me in years, like I was dead in his timeline or something.”

Romana closed her eyes and inhaled knowingly. “Brax was very much the same way.”

“What’s happened, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Romana admitted. “I did have a hypothesis or three, but now. I’m really not quite sure.” She tightened the fold of her arms. “But one thing is for certain, Rose. You and I will figure this out.” She looked off to one side. “Because if there is a way that either of us can help, then you can bet that we’re going to.”

“Even if it means changing a timeline?” She swallowed. “I mean, if we are dead or something.”

Romana flicked her eyes toward Rose. There was a slight narrowing within them. “The chance is slim that we are,” she admitted. “Much less before either of the two of them.” She looked back at the clearing. “The chances are higher that we’ve either walked out on them. Which means a rather stern discussion needs to be held with the women we both become in our future. What could we possibly be thinking letting either of those two to wander the universe without us?”

“God, Romana,” Rose breathed out worriedly. “I hope; I _really_ hope it’s as simple as that.”

“I hope so as well, Rose,” she admitted. “But for now. We need to wear our brightest and least worried smiles. We have a bonfire to attend, and two husbands within our own timeline that need our focus.” She took Rose’s hand in hers. “Tonight let’s live our present. Tomorrow, we will deal with the future.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	47. Bonfire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's bonfire night. Brax and the Doctor have more than a few strong beverages ... the ladies start to plot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: This starts off on the racy side. The racy couple aren't one of the big two, which might be startling to most. But we have serious die-hard shippers among us, and I wanted to make them smile with this.
> 
> The Plot Thinens, Ginger Gold Rose, the beginning of this chapter is for you.... Hope you enjoy...
> 
> For those who don't like racy, then scroll down to the first: ~~oooOOOooo~~ to begin the actual chapter bit....
> 
> Post that bit, it all runs fairly standard. I didn't get to where I wanted to toady ... it seems that I needed to work more stuff out than I had originally thought I had to. Anyhoo, I do sinceriously hope that you enjoy!

~~oooOOOooo~~

Leela’s dark eyes were lifted toward the stars above her. There was a light gape in her lips and her breaths were hard and deep. She swallowed deeply and closed her eyes as she felt the almost clumsy collapse of Andred onto the blanket at her side. His own breaths were short and hard and huffed against her cheek as he moved in close to drape a sweated arm across her naked belly.

“My hearts beat for you,” he whispered against her cheek as he battled to wet his tongue inside his dried mouth. 

“I am devoted to you as well,” she answered him with a light and husky voice. Her eyes were still closed as she willed her heart to return to a normal rhythm. She slowly brought her legs together and shifted her shoulders just lightly to seek comfort within his hold. His nose nuzzled against the tender spot below her ear, which drew a smile from her. “Your need for continued affection after we share intimacy, Andred. It confuses me.”

“I don’t see why,” he answered with a light kiss at the very edge of her ear. “But if you need explanation, it’s because I’m not yet ready to sever the connection I have with you so soon after we’ve achieved completion.”

“But no connection is as intimate as when you are inside me,” she queried with a look back up to the stars that shone above them. 

“I beg to differ,” he countered with a light huff as he rolled onto his back and cradled his hands atop his belly. “Any moment that we touch in an affectionate manner, I feel is very intimate.” A smile broke across his face. “Particularly when we lie together naked.”

“Which is a condition we should correct,” she said with a light smile across her cheeks. “Unless we wish to be discovered in this state.”

“You have the female wolf patrolling the boundary of our sanctuary,” he reminded her with a laugh. “I challenge anyone to break the lines of her territory to make any such discovery.” He rolled his head to look at her. His breath caught at the beauty of her skin underneath the light of the moon above them. His eyes traced the perfect lines of her forehead, nose, lips, and chin, but he held back from reaching out to touch her. “You are the most magnificent being in the known universe.” He sighed gratefully. “I don’t understand just how I was so lucky to have not only met you, but to become your devoted husband as well.”

“You are a good man,” she answered without looking away from the stars. “And good men deserve their reward.”

“Are you suggesting that you are my reward, Leela?”

She rolled her head to look into his eyes and gave him a smile. “You are mine,” she said gently. “I will hope that I am yours as well.”

“There are so many ways that I can describe what you are for me,” he said gently, finally releasing the hold of his hands to trace her cheeks and jaw with his fingertips. “So many words to elevate you toward divinity in my eyes. _Reward_ is definitely not one of them.” He moved forward to kiss lightly at her mouth. “That would imply that you are a prize, a mere token, or a simple gesture.” He ran his hand down along her naked belly. “You are so much more than that. So much more.”

“I am but a savage,” she said with a hard sigh as her eyes shifted back upward to the sky. “Or so say your people.”

“Who cares what they say?” he growled as his lips met with her shoulder. “I don’t. Do you?”

Her eyes closed and she let out a sigh at the line of tender kisses he placed along her collarbone. “I do not,” she breathed out with a light writhe in her shoulder. “I only care about what _you_ think and say, Andred.” She bit at her lip when his mouth trailed toward her breast. “Your voice is the only one that matters to me.”

He hummed but said nothing as he concentrated all his focus on his ministrations and the adorable sounds they drew from his wife.

“We should not begin this again,” she said along a breathy voice that betrayed her words. “We have committed to joining the others at the bonfire.”

“They can wait,” he said with a growl as his mouth trailed down from her breast toward her navel. “This cannot.”

She couldn’t stop the bite at her lip that anticipation and desire caused. “What cannot wait?” she queried on a high sigh when he shifted to settle himself between her legs, his lips against her hip bone.

“Reminding you who you are to me,” he answered firmly. “Because I’m slightly concerned that you may have forgotten.”

“I see,” she half whimpered. “And to remind me of this, you must…?” Her breath gasped in deeply when he drew her knee up onto his shoulder and drew the thick flat of his tongue up along the length of her. One of her hands fisted hard at the grass, the other at the thick hair on his head when his mouth cupped her tightly and his tongue began to work its sublime magic against her. “Oh,” she groaned out long. “Oh, Andred…”

~~oooOOOooo~~

He might’ve been a skinny bloke, but the Doctor was definitely more comfortable than his stick-figure frame might suggest. For a little under an hour, as the party between the lines of travel capsules continued on, Rose had been seated on a thick woven blanket, nestled comfortably inside the part of her husband’s legs. He was comfortably slouched up against the thick trunk of a fallen tree, the diameter of which was high enough to reach up to his shoulders. He held a bottle of Magenta wine in one hand, and the waist of his wife in the other. 

For the past hour, he’d been steadily focused on that one bottle of wine, and of the conversation he shared with his brother. Both men sat in a mirror image of each other: One arm laid across a knee, the other providing a comfortable elbow-lean on the tree that allowed them to quietly chat between themselves. Romana was seated between Braxiatel’s legs, much like Rose was with the Doctor, however she sat sideways inside his legs to engage herself inside the conversation of the brothers.

Rose. She wasn’t at all focused on the conversation being held behind her. She was far more intrigued by the party-antics of the Gallifreyans finally allowed their freedom from war, and from a small home in London. The Outerworlders of Gallifrey celebrated in a far different fashion to those that resided within the dome of the Capitol in inside Arcadia. Time Lords were, for the most part, quite restrained in their celebratory behaviours. Rose had never seen an all-out party full of revelry and cheer on Gallifrey such as the likes she was witnessing right now. Oh, sure, they got drunk and slobbery in more extreme moments of celebration, but the singing, dancing, story telling, and even three different kinds of handfasting ceremonies between refugees…

…This was life. This was living. This was embracing one’s existence in it’s fullest.

She let out a sigh of appreciation toward a traditional Gallifreyan dance near the fire. There was a shift of the Doctor’s chest against her back, and his lips very tenderly touched to her cheek. “Are you okay?”

The smell of Magenta wine was strong on his breath and she could hear the light slur of intoxication in his question. She lifted her head and smiled against his jaw. “I’m so okay right now that I’m in another solar system.”

He hummed happily. “Just don’t travel too far away.”

She sighed as a reply to that and lowered her eyes without turning her head back to dance. Her eyes met with Romana’s and she smiled. “How’re _you_ doing?”

“Tired,” she admitted quietly. “But I am happy.” There was a smile on her face, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

Rose narrowed her eyes just slightly. She shifted against the Doctor’s chest to bring herself closer to the Time Lady. It didn’t surprise her that Romana shifted forward as well. They were only an inch away from being nose to nose, both of their ears resting against the arms of their respective mates.

“You’re having trouble taking your mind off things, aren’t you?” Rose asked her quietly.

“There is always quite a lot on my mind,” Romana replied with a one-sided smile. “Things that won’t leave and insist on taking precedence of thought.”

“And right now, you’re focused on …” she flicked her eyes toward the clearing, to where the elder incarnations of their family had been a couple of hours earlier. “On them.”

“I am.”

“So much for focusing on our present tonight,” she teased with a light smile. “And worrying about the future tomorrow.”

“Technically it already is tomorrow,” she offered with a smile. “Relative time, of course.”

“Estrailian days are shorter than back home, are they?”

“Enough that I can claim for it to be tomorrow already,” she answered with a wide smile. “So that said…” She waggled her brows.

She flicked her eyes upward in a gesture to indicate the Doctor and Braxiatel. “Do you think either of them are quite drunk enough for us to engage in this particular line of conversation without them overhearing?”

“I don’t believe so,” she admitted. “The both of them are sneaky and will sober up in an instant if they think we might be plotting and planning without them.” She pursed her lips. “We need to think of some reason to get away from them that won’t draw their suspicions.”

“You think they’ll get suspicious?”

“Rose…” She sighed. “Despite spending a great deal of my life being aloof and hiding every part of me from other council members and alien political allies and enemies, my ability to hide anything from my husband is rather limited at best. Now that he is in a heightened protective mode right now because…” She smiled and dropped her eyes to her belly.

“I’m so happy for the both of you,” Rose swooned with a sigh of complete happiness. “I can’t wait to be an auntie and spoil your kids rotten … then send them home to you full of sugar like you did so many times to me and the Doctor.”

“You wouldn’t…”

“I absolutely will,” she affirmed with a laugh. She lifted her head. “Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

He looked down toward his wife with a slightly dopey grin on his pinkening face. “Sorry, Hearts, what was that?”

“When we babysit Brax and Romana’s little ones, we’re gonna do to them what they did to us, right?”

One brow dropped, the other lifted high in an expression of question. “Ehm. Not entirely sure what you’re talking about, but if you want to do it, then you have my full support on it.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “Whatever you want. Your every wish is my most honoured command.”

Rose flicked her eyes down to Romana. “Something tells me that if I asked for anything in the entire universe right now, I might actually get it.”

“You bet you will,” the Doctor declared with a lift of his bottle to his lips for a deep draw of wine. He winced just slightly with the swallow, but quickly smiled. “Anything my beautiful mate wants, my beautiful mate gets. It will become my mission.”

Romana cleared her throat in warning. “I think what your mate wants right now, Doctor, is for you to get back to talking to your brother so she and I can continue with the conversation _we_ were having.” Her brows remained high and her eyes widened with order when he didn’t immediately turn back toward Braxiatel, who seemed to be chuckling at Romana’s chiding. “Well?”

“You can be very mean. You know that, Romana?” the Doctor said with a sniff. “But fine.” He looked back to his brother and immediately moved straight back into conversation.

“Anyway,” Romana continued with a light shift forward so that she and Rose were actually nose to nose. “As I said, hiding anything from Brax is not something I am capable of right now.”

“And you think that sitting against his chest and telling me that is a really good idea?” She smirked. “He’s got some pretty impressive hearing skills, you know.”

“Not when he’s drinking,” she whispered in reply. “Now. We need to get up and away.”

“So, what do you suggest?” she quickly held up a finger. “And remember that unlike these two, I haven’t been drinking. No suggestions to go something embarrassing like dancing.”

“Well, I would hardly suggest that now, would I?” Romana replied with a pinch of indignance in her brow. “I am rather uncoordinated when it comes to dancing. Which explains why I despise celebratory balls and galas.”

“We could say we need to go to the bathroom.”

“I’m sorry, what?” she asked with a surprised look. “That’s an awfully simplistic option, don’t you think?”

“Simple’s usually better,” she said with a shrug. “Back home, when I was younger and went out with the girls, if we ever wanted to get away from the blokes, then we’d convoy a group to the bathroom. Blokes don’t even blink at it.”

Romana hummed. “Well. Although it’s somewhat uncivilized and unusual to admit a requirement to use the facilities, I suppose we could try it.” She smiled. “And if it does work, then it is certainly something that can be successfully deployed at another time.” 

“Okay, let’s do it.”

“You lead.”

Rose smirked. Surely Romana could simply command Braxiatel to bugger off and leave her alone, and he’d be obligated to do so. She looked toward the hold he had around her shoulder, and the lean of his head against hers, and determined that no, he probably wouldn’t. His hold was definitely as much protective as it was tender and affectionate. He’d sniff about pretty quickly…

She lifted her head to look up at the Doctor. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she announced with wide eyes filled with apology. 

His brow lifted. “Okay. And you’re telling me this because?”

“Because I’m leaving your pinstriped snuggle cage here, and if I happen to be the only thing holding your drunken butt in a steady upright postion, I wanted to give you adequate warning before....” She held her hand upward and motioned a sideways fall, offering light accompanying sound effects that ended with: “Splat.”

He pressed his lips together and gave a single nod. “Cheers,” he said after a swallow. “Much appreciated that. Would hate to fall into an undignified heap in front of everyone here…”

“Not like there aren’t already those that haven’t,” Rose said with a shrug and a gesture toward a section of the field that already had several of the Southerners already arse-up and passed out.

She slowly drew to a joint-creaking stand and found herself having to stretch out her lower back. “Oh,” she groaned out. “I think I’m getting old.” She looked to the Doctor. “Might be time to trade up, shortly.”

“Not even a joke, so don’t,” he replied with a lift of his finger in warning. “And ‘sides. I’ve got …” he cleared his throat. “Close to a thousand years on you.”

She hummed happily and leaned down with her forearms on his shoulders to steal a kiss. What was supposed to be chaste, deepened a little too quickly, and she fell to her knees either side of his hips. She shifted rather suggestively against his lap and sucked at his bottom lip. It drew a low growl from deep within the back of his throat.

“If you’re, ehm, ready to head back to the TARDIS….”

“You’re drunk,” she chided softly. “So, no.”

“I can sober up real fast,” he promised her huskily. “Just have to put my mind to it.”

Braxiatel’s arm shot in between the two of them. He moved his head in close enough that the tip of his nose was up against both of theirs. “He’s not ready just yet, Rose. You just leave this drunken fool with me a bit longer if you don’t mind. Mating shenanigans can wait a little bit longer, yes?”

She looked at him with a smirk. “Why? So you can both get even more drunk?”

“Something like that.” He waved his bottle in a bottom-led tilt that sloshed what was left inside the bottle. “Been a while since the two of us were able to tie one on.”

“You don’t brawl when you do, right?”

The Doctor shook his head. “Nah. Only do that when we’re sober.”

She poked out her bottom lip, looked between the two of them, then focused her look on Braxiatel. “Okay then. Let me have Romana for a bit, and you can have Thete.”

“Not really a good deal that,” Braxiatel groused. “My exquisite and remarkable beauty in exchange for _that_ joker?”

Romana let out a moan and shifted out of her husband’s hold. “I will come with you, Rose. Let us let these two enjoy whatever the Magenta wine provides them with.” She lightly kissed his mouth. “I won’t be long.”

She stood and waited for Rose to stand at her side. Then, hand in hand, the two women walked across the grasses toward the other side of the bonfire.

“Well that ended up a little more complicated than a simple request to use the facilities,” Romana remarked with a shake in her head. 

Rose shrugged. “Whatever, it worked. We got free of them.”

“Free from who?” Leela asked from the split between capsules. Her eyes narrowed when both Rose and Romana gasped with startlement. “Do I need to give warning to others for you to be left alone?”

Andred’s chuckle shifted in almost as a response of its own to her question. “I believe, my wife, that Romana and Rose were looking for momentary freedom from their husbands.” His smirk was heard more than actually seen as he was leaned against a capsule and was hidden inside the darkened shadow. “Am I correct?”

“How would you like to join them for a while, Andred?” Romana offered with a lift in her chin and a straightening in her spine. “I am quite sure the both of them will appreciate your company.”

“Potential referee?” Rose asked with a chuckle. “They’re both at least three bottles in by now.”

“Surprised they’re still standing,” Andred remarked.

“They’re not,” Romana confirmed with a wave of her hand toward the pair, still seated with their backs propped up against the fallen tree trunk. Her voice was firm and full of command. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to join them?”

His mouth gaped with understanding. “Ahhh, yes. You’d like some private time with Leela. Your invitation is more an order for me to depart, isn’t it?”

“You are a very clever man,” she replied with a forced and very facetious smile.

“And you aren’t in any way condescending at all, my Lady,” he gruffed with a deep bow that held as much facetiousness within it as her smile did. “I will join the lads.” He kissed Leela on the cheek, paused a moment to tenderly stroke his fingers down her cheek, then turned and departed quickly, his large bulking form casting a shadow upon the three women as he walked toward the fire.

“Ooh, he’s a big one, isn’t he?” Rose remarked with a smile. She looked toward Leela with a waggle in her brow. “Is he?”

Romana looked slightly confused by the question, whereas Leela simply shook her head. “The Doctor is a tall and skinny one, isn’t he?” she answered with a cheeky smirk.

“Well touché,” Rose said with a laugh. She let her laugh falter and turned to Romana. “Right. So now we’re away from the super-sonic hearing and protective natures of our mates. What level of plotting and planning did you wish to engage in?”

“Come with me,” Romana ordered flatly. “Best we discuss in the Capsule.” She led both women into Braxiatel’s capsule and walked quickly up to the centre console, not bothering to look behind her to confirm she was followed before speaking again. “I’ve been trying to think of just what may have happened to our future selves that has both Brax and the Doctor in the states they are.”

Leela took place to Romana’s left. Her arms shifted into a fold across her chest and her chin was lifted, yet tilted to one side in question. “What state is that, Romana?” She looked to Rose, who stepped up to Romana’s right. “And is this the future or current incarnation that you speak of?”

“Future,” Rose answered her. 

“I did not realise that the Doctor was here as well as Braxiatel.”

“Random drop in, I think,” Rose said with a shrug. “I don’t think he’s hanging about or anything like that.”

Romana lifted her eyes to the monitor as she pulled up a systems request screen. “Actually, Rose, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.” She swallowed and drew in a breath. “If he behaved with you in the same alarming manner as Brax did with me, then I suspect he’s not going anywhere any time soon.”

Leela’s eyes pinched with worried question. “And in what way was that?”

Romana kept her eyes on the monitor as her hands flew across the keyboard. “In a manner to suggest that, Rose and I no longer exist within their timeline.”

“Oh,” Leela said with a long exhale. “Well that would certainly answer the questions that Andred and I have had during our hunts.”

Rose leaned forward to look across Romana’s chest toward Leela. “What questions?”

“Why he has not returned to Gallifrey in the months that we have been on planet,” she answered. “Why he does not speak of his mate. Why, when I ask him about the two of you, he changes the subject.” She hooked her hair behind her ear and leaned one hand on the countertop of the console. “Andred and I have talked to each other about our concerns. We both see it. Braxiatel is not himself.”

“That I can confirm,” Romana agreed with a nod of her head. Her eyes were still on the monitor, and even as multiple alert windows popped up onscreen in warning that she was treading on ground she should not, she pressed on without frustration. “And based on what Rose told me about her meeting with the Doctor of her future, he’s behaving in much the same level of unhinged and desperate behaviour.”

Leela looked to Rose for confirmation, and with her nod shifted her eyes back toward Romana. “Are you going to discuss this with the mates of your timeline?”

“Absolutely not,” Romana barked out. “The last thing any of us need right now is the two of them rushing off half-cocked and in panic. And I think we can all agree that is exactly what will happen in either of them find out.”

“So instead, you feel it more appropriate for the two of you run in in much the same manner?” Leela queried with a light smile.

“Do either of us looked panicked or half-cocked?”

“Well, no. You don’t,” Leela answered. She pressed her other hand into the console and leaned down heavily to let her eyes wander through the information that popped up on the monitor as Romana worked to get into whatever system she was looking to hack into. “Am I to assume that by telling me this, you wish me to assist?”

“Is that okay?” Romana asked carefully.

“I’ve been hunting Zombies every day for nearly five months,” Leela said with a sigh. “You could ask me to do _anything_ else right now and I would agree to it.”

Rose grinned. “Never thought I’d hear you suggest you were getting sick of a hunt, Leela.”

“Best you don’t let that admission get out,” she answered with a light wink in her eye. “It is, however, quite tiring after a while. A new adventure will give me the renewed spirit to resume my chase.” Her eyes shifted to the monitor as it continued to beep and warn against access. “What are you looking for, Romana?”

“I’m trying to access the translevel communications system to link this ship to her future self.” Her brows lifted. “It means having to bypass a couple of Braxiatel’s security system protocols, and she doesn’t like that very much.”

Rose lifted her hand to press against the rotor column. “Oh, darling. We’d really appreciate your help on this, yeah? We don’t mean to hurt you…”

“It’s not hurting her,” Romana clarified. She’s merely being loyal to her pilot and not letting me bypass his coding.

Rose pursed her lips. “Now, darling. Your future pilot. He’s not happy. He’s grieving and upset right now. We’re only trying to help him.” She stroked the column gently. “You only want what’s best for him, yeah? I’m sure saving his hearts is high on that list.”

Leela’s brow lifted. “Are you _really_ trying to reason with the ship, Rose?”

“Worth a shot,” she answered with a shrug. “This old girl loves Brax. Makes sense she’d want to keep him happy, right?”

“Yes that may be true,” Romana said with a sigh. “But she doesn’t much like me.”

“Well, that’s a surprise,” Rose said with a lift in both brows. “She and I get along very well.” She stroked at the column and pleaded once more. “Come on, baby. Your future pilot is really, really sad right now. Help us help him.”

There was a sudden wash of amber across Rose’s eyes. In a moment, the console finally beeped to grant Romana access. “Thank you,” she breathed out with genuine gratefulness to the ship. “I vow to you that we won’t let you down.”

“Tough vow to make when we don’t know what we’re up against,” Rose warned low.

“If it’s too much for us, then we enlist the help of others,” Romana suggested flatly. “Won’t we?”

“Both of whom will shut us out,” Rose warned. “Particularly you.” She lowered her eyed to make her point. “You won’t have the choice if you involve Brax.”

Romana drummed her fingertips on the counter in thought. “That is very true, of course.” She shook her head and exhaled hard. “Which means we do this. The three of us. No need to involve mates of any of us. Am I agreed?”

“Sure,” Rose sang out.

“Of course,” Leela agreed. 

“Perfect,” Romana said with a smile as she linked both the past and future machines. “We’ve gained access to our future’s capsule. I’ll take a quick look and see what Brax has stored in the databanks of his ship.”

“Good luck,” Rose wished with a huff and a roll in her eyes. “Bound to be a mess.” Leela chuckled with agreement.

“Actually,” Romana corrected with a smile. “Unlike both Andred and the Doctor, Brax has an extremely organized filing system for his ship. Perhaps it’s from a millennium on council receiving folder after folder of mostly redundant information that must repeatedly be called upon between meetings and meetings and random sessions.” She leaned on the console with the press of one hand as she searched the folders with the other. “If he wasn’t organised, he’d fall apart very quickly.” She sighed. “And so would I. I rely on him much more than I should to make sure I have what I need.”

Rose leaned down, her forearms on the console top, and looked up at the information. Swirling glyphs as usual, a language she hadn’t yet been able to master. “Anything?” she said with a sigh after a moment.

Romana’s eyes were wide on the monitor. “By the Gods….”

Both Rose and Leela stood up quickly, almost to attention. “What is it?” Rose asked quickly.

“I can confirm that you and I are definitely absent from their timestream,” she answered slowly. “There are detailed reports and communications between Brax and the Doctor.”

“Any details on what happened?”

Romana shook her head slowly. “Nothing. Nothing at all except to say that we were sent on an envoy assignment. We never showed up, and we also never returned.”

“Envoy to where?” Leela asked.

“To Earth,” she answered after a swallow. “Just a simple, routine trip. Not enough to warrant escort of even Chancellery Guards.”

“Which is always when you can expect something to go wrong,” Leela snarled. “What were you thinking not taking escort?”

“Obviously I wasn’t thinking,” she answered with a hard sigh. She read further and lowered her head with a long exhale of worry.

“What’s wrong?” Rose pressed.

“This isn’t new,” Romana said almost inaudibly. “It’s not something that happened yesterday, the day before that, or a week ago.”

Leela swallowed hard. “How long has it been, Romana?”

“Ten years,” Romana answered with her hand lifting to cover her mouth. “They‘ve been searching for us for ten years. Ten years, and they haven’t given up on us.”

“do you honestly believe they would?” Leela asked quietly. “I can say without a doubt, Romana, that if there was even a remote chance of you still being alive, they would both keep looking for you.”

“As we would them,” Rose added. Her own heart was inside her belly at the news, but she bit down any emotion she could possibly draw from that revelation. “But where could we possibly be where the TARDIS wouldn’t be able to find us? Surely she would in a tenth of that time if she was given the correct search parameters.”

“You mean our bio-data signature,” Romana said with a nod. “You’re correct. The capsules are all fitted with bio-data scanners. We should be able to be found no matter where in time and space we are.” She looked up to the rotor column with a pinch in her brow. “Brax keeps his capsule meticulously maintained and upgraded with the most updated software and technology. If his capsule cannot find us…” She looked toward Rose. “Then we aren’t anywhere to be found.”

Rose gulped. “So. Are you saying that in their timeline, we’re dead, and they just can’t accept it?”

“I don’t know what other conclusion to draw,” Romana answered sadly. “Somehow, our capsule must have been intercepted and destroyed.” She drew in a long breath. “Leaving no trace at all.”

“So there’s nothing at all we can do?”

Romana shook her head. She quickly moved forward to exit the programming and delete any trace of her presence. “They can’t see this. Neither of them. No one can see this.”

“Wait,” Rose said with urgency as she snapped out a hand to grab Romana’s wrist. “What. What if you’n me. What if we weren’t who we are… um…” 

“You’re not making any sense at all,” Romana said Impatiently.

Her face tightened up to a wince of struggle to form her words in a coherent manner. She truly didn’t understand what she was talking about, which made it difficult. “Back a few years ago. Before me and the Doctor were separated, I ended up in Australia.” She looked to Romana. “Remember that? When I was gone for a couple of weeks.”

Romana nodded slowly. “I think I recall something of that nature.”

Rose held up both hands eagerly. “Back then the Doctor. He did something to himself. Hid himself from the aliens that were after him. He was human.”

“The Chameleon Arch,” Romana said with dawning realisation. “That…. That _would_ make it difficult – or impossible – for even the most updated bioscan to see.” She pressed her finger to her lip in thought. “The scanner would have to have the arched biodata uploaded in order to include it in their search parameters. So if …” She smiled and rushed back into the system. “So, If the two of us chose to use the Chameleon Arch and didn’t arrange an upload of that data from our capsule one the change had been effected. It _would_ be impossible to find us.”

Leela didn’t bother posing her question toward Romana, she seemed far too focused on the monitor. She instead leaned backward to look across Romana’s back toward Rose. “What is this Arch you speak of?”

Rose stepped around Romana to stand face to face with Leela. “I’ve seen the way it works, but I’m not an authority on it or anything.” She licked at her lips and thought back to Australia. “But what I remember was when the Doctor used it on himself to turn himself into a human…”

“He did what?” she barked out incredulously, her eyes wide and horrified. “Why would he need to do something like that?”

Rose shrugged. “He was trying to hide from some Time Lord eating aliens, I think. But he changed, completely. One heart, one life, completely human. Nothing of the Doctor remained of him…”

“It did,” Romana corrected without looking backward. “His Time Lord biodata would have been transferred into an appropriate receptacle provided by his TARDIS.”

“A watch,” Rose offered.

“That’s right,” Romana said, finally turning to face them. She looked toward Leela. “The Time Lord consciousness, everything that makes them Time Lord, is stored inside a very small item.” Her brows pinched. “We don’t use the device often, as it is extremely painful and volatile, but it is used, and it is very effective at making a Time Lord, or a Time lady, disappear without a trace.”

“More Time Lord wizardry,” Leela huffed out with disgust. “Is there no end to the lies your people tell? Not enough that it’s just words, but it’s also their species?”

“It’s called survival,” Romana offered.

“Could it be that’s what’s happened here, Romana?” There was hope inside her voice.

“Improbable,” she answered. “But it could be worth looking into.” She moved back to the keyboard. “If it is the case and the two of us have used the arch, then the capsule would be in emergency stasis condition.” She swallowed. “Not detectable on a full sweep, or even a deeper level scan. But if we input data specific to the capsule and run a scan for any residual energy at all…”

“I’m pretty sure that Brax and the Doctor would have thought of doing that,” Rose said with a defeated huff.

“Not necessarily,” she countered. “The temporal hum produced by a Capsule in emergency stasis is very different to a search for an active, retired, or even deceased capsule.” She looked to one side, toward both Leela and Rose. “You have to input very specific scan criteria that neither of our husbands would have considered, unless they entertained the idea that either of us were arched.”

Rose and Leela stepped back toward the console, and all three of them watched the spinning circle on the monitor with hope. It felt like an eternity, but the scan only took a few short minutes to complete. At the beep, an image of a solar system appeared on the screen, with a single flashing dot upon what appeared to be an asteroid orbiting a small star.

“Where is it?” Rose asked warily.

Romana drew in a long breath. “It’s an asteroid located within the Gamatra Sector,” she answered with a pinch in her brow. “Known as KS-159.” Her lips pursed outward. “It’s the location of the Oracle of the Lost, the Temple of the Lost…” she swallowed. “And the home of the Braxiatel Collection.”

Rose and Leela shot Romana looks of complete shock at that. “The Braxiatel Collection,” Rose confirmed. “As in _Irving_ Braxiatel?”

“As in him indeed,” Romana answered darkly.

“What would he have to do with us going missing?” Rose asked worriedly. “And wouldn’t he know to let his elder self know where we were? And even if not me, definitely _you_.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Romana asked curiously. “Why wouldn’t he? What does he have to gain in keeping us from our spouses? From _himself_.”

“Maybe we should ask him?” Leela offered with a dangerous tilt in her head. She ran her thumb along the hilt of one of her knives. “I can be quite persuasive if you need me to be.” One side of her mouth stretched to a smile. “Particularly Brax.” She winked. “I know his weakness.”

“Same weakness as all blokes, I reckon,” Rose huffed out. She passed a look to Romana. “So. Do you think you can get the temporal coordinates for that Capsule? Time we planned a trip, yeah?” 

“With what capsule?” Romana asked with a low growl. “We can’t take the TARDIS, nor this one. I lost mine on Gallifrey.”

“Oh, a capsule won’t be the issue,” Rose said with a smile. “We have a whole field of beautiful boys and girls all eager to get back out there and into mischief. You leave that bit to me.”

“That field is on the other side of the planet,” Romana reminded her. Her eyes flicked to the door. “And I can’t see escaping them will be all that easy to jaunt across the planet to steal a travel capsule.”

“Then,” Rose said with pursed and cheeky lips. “Then we need to make sure all three of them are good and very drunk tonight. Once they pass out, we can borrow Narvin’s time ring. Bip bam boom, off to the northern hemisphere to knick a capsule, then off to the Braxiatel Collection, let Leela neuter young Brax, find our elder selves, turn them back to normal…. Back in time for breakfast!”

Leela smiled. “I can not really see any part of that that I immediately disagree with.” She held up a knife and admired the glint of the sharpened blade. “When do we leave?”

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~


	48. Snenanigans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Ladies steal a capsule and head to the Collection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know what it's like to have an annoying mosquito buzzing about your head with its incessant buzzing and biting? Yeah, well imagine a teenaged boy sized one of those, and you can imagine how my day went today .... Not a moment of peace at all.... I love that lad with everything inside me, but sometimes just five minutes of quiet might be nice....
> 
> That said... not as much done as I wanted, but still got a bit done.
> 
> Note: I have listened to a total of 2 Bernice Summerfield stories to date... that's it, 2. So this wee little bit of her may be so OOC that you'll gag. I promise to listen to more her stories (I have a good twenty or so on my playlist) over the weekend to get a better handle on her characterisations moving forward... She's a bit of a big player in this...
> 
> That's it for me till Monday, so I hope this will tie you over till then.

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~

Rose Tyler opened her left eye to a small slit to look up into the darkness that blanketed her bedroom on the TARDIS. Slowly she allowed the other eye to open and looked up toward a swirling shift of deep colours depicting the night sky over Gallifrey. A lazy smile shifted across her face and she writhed just slightly with a sense of awe and longing to be able to one day gaze upon this magnificent view once again some day.

At her side, she heard the deep snuffle and slap of lips of her sleeping husband. His arm across her belly naked belly, and the light ache she felt in between her legs provided a pretty vivid remembrance to just what had led the two of them into this somewhat damp and sweated pile underneath a thin cotton bedsheet.

Shortly before returning to their husbands at the edge of the bonfire, Romana had decided that in order to secure unnoticed freedom from their respective, and rather protective mates, sneaky shenanigans needed to occur…

…and yes, she’d actually used the word “shenanigans”.

Just what those shenanigans were to be wasn’t exactly detailed, but Romana did insist that while she didn’t have a plan just yet, she’d come up with something as the night drew on. The plan came when a slightly intoxicated Jackie Tyler, who had found a remarkably easy “friendship” with Gragol of the Southern Mountains, complained sadly about missing so much in her daughter’s life since she took off with the Doctor.

“I didn’t even get a wedding,” she said with a sad sigh. “Couldn’t get all pretty and give my baby away at the alter. She just went off and did it, didn’t she? Didn’t want her mum around.”

“Well, that just isn’t right, Jackie,” Gragol declared without so much as a slur in his voice despite downing at least double the amount of alcohol as anyone else in the clearing. “This is something that needs to be rectified. Immediately!” 

And when a Southern Mountaineer uses a word like “Immediately”, they don’t mess about. Before Rose knew what was afoot, she had been pulled from the protective pinstriped arms and legs of her husband and was hauled off into one of the residence capsules to be frantically and excitedly tossed from one side to the other by an entire tribe of dedicated, focused Southern women. There were hands in her hair, makeup brushes on her face, and hands switching out her entire wardrobe. She was back outside and standing in front of the fire before she could even begin to comprehend what was happening.

She looked down to her hands, and the small delicate wreath of flowers laid across them, then looked upward with utter confusion in her eyes. To her immediate front stood the Doctor. No longer in pinstripes but clad in the almost rag-like clothing of the outerworlders, and a lei of flowers across his brow, he appeared to have been completely and miraculously sobered up. Either side of him were Romana and Braxiatel, the latter of which still swayed with the effects of intoxication.

“What’s happening?” she asked quietly, a slight lean in toward the Doctor.

“We’re getting married, apparently,” he answered with a wide smile and a glint of happiness in his eye. 

“But we’re already married.” 

“A reaffirmation of our vows in the way of the Southern Mountaineers,” he said gently with a lift of his hand to cup her cheek. “A new and brilliant beginning for us, wouldn’t you say? Very long overdue.”

She smiled and leaned into his touch. “Was this your idea?”

“I wish it was,” he admitted with a light sigh. “But, no. Gragol insisted on it. Said it wasn’t fair of us to have denied your mother fron witnessing our vows.” His look shifted to serious question. “Is it okay with you? I mean, we can _try_ to tell them no if you prefer.”

“No. No. I think it’s perfect. ‘Specially with Mum here.” She looked to her side as Jackie stepped in close. She was dressed in fine Southern Mountain fabrics, with the soft natural makeup of the people that was already running with tears. “Oh, Mum…”

“My baby’s getting married,” Jackie swooned. “And this time I get to see it.”

A handfasting ceremony in front of friends, family, and all the people the two of them helped save finished with tears and cheers. The cheering included demands and orders for their marriage to be immediately consummated, and as the Doctor carried his bride toward the TARDIS with the clear intent to do just that, he did so through a tunnel of boisterous well wishers and a rain of flower petals.

Amazing…

That was at least three hours ago now, and it was little wonder she was a little on the side of aching. She could perfectly understand why it was that the elder Doctor had considered it a memorable evening between the sheets. She wasn’t likely to forget it herself any time soon.

It was more than a little tempting to remain in bed and inside the sleepy hold of the Doctor. Despite the sweaty and damp, musk-scented cocoon of sheets that surrounded them, there really wasn’t anywhere else she wanted to be. Unfortunately for her body’s desire to remain where it was, there was somewhere else she had to be. With the slowest and sneakiest of movements, Rose slipped out of bed and quickly dressed.

~~oooOOOooo~~

“Oh, where is she?” Romana asked with a huff for the third time in less than five minutes. “We are very limited on time. Sunrise will occur in less than an hour.”

Leela picked at her nail with the tip of her blade and smiled lightly. “They are celebrating their marriage, Romana. It is not to be rushed or hurried.” She looked upward to the night sky above. “And besides. We still have another ten minutes until we agreed to meet. Rose is not late. You are just being impatient.”

“The span in which I may be able to keep my mate oblivious to my absence is rather limited,” she countered with a huff. “If Rose is not here soon, then we may have to embark on this adventure without her.”

“Oh come on,” Rose chirped in breathlessly as she broke through the low-lying brushy limbs of the trees that bordered the small. “I’m actually early for once, and I still get grief for it?” She stopped in front of Romana and shook her head. “There really is no way to win with you, is there?”

“Not at all,” she replied with a sly smile.

Leela holstered her knife and gave Rose a soft smile. My best wishes on your renewed marriage, Rose. I trust that your evening with the Doctor was all that it should be.”

“And then some,” she answered with a wink that drew a light laugh from her. She looked to Romana. “So? Did anyone manage to get hold of Narvin’s Time Ring?” 

Andred’s voice answered that question. He stepped into the clearing with a dark smile and his hand held up to display the item in question. “I had to go with the earlier technology, unfortunately. The newer version of it is specifically calibrated to the assignee’s bio-data.” He handed it to Romana. “Which means it won’t be an entirely pleasant flight.”

Romana took the item with thanks and looked toward Leela with question. “You invited Andred to join us?”

“I did not,” she answered. 

“Then why is he here?”

“To wish my wife a safe journey,” he answered. His eyes flicked between Rose and Romana. “Unlike the two of you who feel it necessary to hide your movements from your husbands, Leela does like to keep me in the loop to her mischief.”

“I will not hide from him,” Leela confirmed with a nod of her head, then a look toward Romana. “Because my mate, _my Andred_ , he trusts in my ability to take care of myself. I do not understand why your mates don’t have the same trust in the two of you.”

“A discussion best left for another time,” Romana answered dryly. She snapped the ring onto her arm and held out her hands to the other two women. “Well? Shall we be off then?”

Leela stepped forward, but not before lifting her chin to press a soft, yet passionate kiss against her husband’s lips. “I will return soon,” she assured him.

“I look forward to it,” he said against her mouth after a light kiss. “Try not to kill anyone.”

“I will try,” she vowed with a wink. “But I make no promises.”

She stepped into the small triangle of women and held the hands of both. There was a glint of excitement in her eyes and a thin, but genuine smile on her lips. “Shall we begin?”

~~oooOOOooo~~

The howling whine and wheeze of a young travel Capsule sang out through reality as he slowly materialised atop a large bitumen pad. Surrounded by carrying shapes and sizes of other travel ships from a multitude of planets fromt eh surrounding solar system and beyond, the ship chose to forego the use of its Chameleon circuit. He was quite happy to remain as he was – a silver-toned cylinder standing tall above all others.

The three women stepped out of the doors of the capsule and immediately fanned themselves against the heat blowing across the bitumen. Rose took a look around them and noted quite curiously that the capsule had materialised in what looked to be a car-park of sorts…

…Well, a ship-park if she was going to be completely honest about her descriptive. 

She looked at the vehicles around them, and then to the final materialisation point of the capsule. There was a wide smile on her face as she gestured toward it. “Don’t ever let ‘em say that a woman doesn’t know how to park. Look at that perfect parking job.”

“Said as tough you were the one piloting it,” Leela sang softly against her ear as she strode past.

“I say it merely in awe and support of the true pilot,” Rose continued with a shrug in her shoulders. “Her Lady Romana.” She pointed to the base of the ship. “Show me a bloke who can pilot a ship through all time and space and materialise with such pinpoint precision that no – inch here or there – qualifications need to be made.” She pulled her phone from her pocket. “Really. I need to take a photograph of that and show the boys. Issue them a proper challenge to do as well…”

“The Doctor materialisation in the correct time zone should be challenge enough,” Romana said with a light laugh in her voice. “He can work on the location accuracy once he’s mastered that.” She locked the door of the capsule and led both women in a walk toward the very edge of the carpark. “We should go.”

Rose tucked her hair behind her ear to keep it from blowing in her face and looked toward Romana. “Do we know what timeline we’ve landed in?” She swallowed. “I mean, if we happen to bump into anyone we might know.”

“That is a good point to make,” Leela agreed. “It is your desire to meet with the Braxiatel that is here. What is the tale of deceit you wish to tell today?”

Romana let out a long sigh. “I don’t intend on lying about the reason we are here,” she confirmed. “I will tell him that this is a matter that involves the future. Any assistance he could provide…”

“Or explanations as to why yours and Rose’s capsule was abandoned here,” Leela added with a low growl. “And where the two of you are.”

“That’s only if he knows,” Rose offered. “Just because the capsule’s here, doesn’t mean it’s his fault. I mean, maybe something happened with the ship, we knew we were in trouble, and the safest place we knew to materialise would be _here_.” She looked at Romana. “Who is the _one_ person that the two of us both trust with our lives? It’s Brax.”

Romana nodded with agreement on that. “He and the Doctor, yes. And depending on who was closest at the time. I can see that being a viable reason.” She swallowed and drew in a long breath. “The Braxiatel that’s here. He’s not the one that knows you.” She looked to Rose. “So please hold back on your familiar behaviour with him.”

“Does he know me?” Leela queried.

Romana nodded. “He knows us both,” she confirmed. “The sense I am getting regarding his current timeline is that this is between his loss on the Axis, and his return to Gallifrey.”

“You don’t like to talk much about the Axis,” Rose remarked curiously. “I’ve heard you mention it a few times, but you never expand on the quick mentions of it.”

“I don’t particularly like to look back on that time,” Romana admitted. “Those times were very tough … on all of us.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose breathed out with genuine apology. 

“You are not at fault,” Romana reminded her. “You have nothing to apologise for.” She bit at her lip and looked ahead toward the face of the building, surrounded in quite possibly the most perfectly manicured and lush gardens she had ever seen. “It would be best if it wasn’t brought up, nor even implied, who we are to him in his future. He must not know that he and I are mated, nor should he know that you are mated to his brother.”

“Won’t he know?” Rose queried. “He should feel your bond, right?” She paused at the curb and looked across lush green grasses and thick box shrubs that lined the pathway ahead of them. “God, that’s beautiful.”

“We will shield,” she warned her. “Both of us. Shield your bond and your mind from him.”

Rose’s voice was a whimper at the scene ahead of her. The shaped and figures that large bushes had been sculpted into were simply majestic and almost looked to be alive. “You forget that the main shield inside my mind was forged by Brax.” She finally looked toward Romana and tapped at her temple. “How can I hide that from him. If he decides to get curious – and face it, he will - and try to take a peek, he’s getting in there no problems.”

“Come here,” Romana said firmly with a lift of her hand. “I’ll override his shield with one of my own. Just don’t fight it.” She pressed her fingertips to Rose’s temple. “Contact.”

“Contact,” Rose replied obediently. 

Romana barely had a moment to find herself within her sister in law’s mind before there was a sharp holler from one of the gardeners tending to a bed of flowers. “Oi! No telepathic hocus pocus nonsense,” he called out. “You can be reported for that.” He slapped at the upper arm of a woman working at his side. “Sally, look at that, will you. Offworlders with their mind games. Boss’d be livid.”

The young woman let out a long suffering sigh of annoyance. “Oh, leave them alone, Jim.”

“I’m just sayin’ is all,” he replied with a huff. “Brax doesn’t like the telepathic stuff. All magic and madness, that is.”

Romana lowered her hand from Rose’s head and looked across to the pair. “Can you tell me how I might find Mr. Braxiatel?”

“Decent question on a good day,” Jim answered with a shrug. “I can never find him.”

“Probably because he actively avoids you,” Sally replied with another sigh. She lifted her small shovel to gesture toward a large building at the end of a long courtyard. “Check in with Diana inside. She’s his assistant…”

“Yeah,” Jim drawled. “More of a personal sort than admin – if you get my drift.”

“Oh shut up,” Sally huffed. After a shake in her head she looked back to the trio. “Look. You need to find Brax, find Diana. She’ll let you know what his calendar’s like and slot you in sometime in the next millennia.” She looked to Jim. “Hardcore, that one. Did you know she actually had the gall to deny me…”

Her voice petered down to soft conversation with him, which really left all three women no smarter about the workings of Braxiatel than they had been before the conversation. Romana’s lips parted ready to ask another question, but she thought better of it and inhaled a deep breath instead as she turned toward the large white-stoned building ahead of them. “Well. I guess we go and find this Diana, don’t we?”

“Ooh,” Rose sang out with a light tease in her tone. “Bit flatter and more snarly than normal, Romana. Me and Leela don’t have to worry about you getting all territorial, are we? Do we need to corner Brax’s girlfriend and…”

“I’ll happily disembowel her for you if you like,” Leela offered smoothly. “Or make a strategic cut or two of warning.” She looked around at the surroundings, noting the absolute beauty of it, but also lamenting the fact that there was nothing at all natural to give it true majesty. 

“Both of you, stop,” Romana warned low. “This is before our mating. I can’t expect him not to have enjoyed female company before we were finally committed to each other.” She swallowed. “He was a very desirable man in that incarnation.”

“To you, perhaps,” Leela said with a shrug. 

“To many.”

They made it to the end of the courtyard and took a moment to look upward at the towering structure before them. The white stones were near pearlized as they shone and glimmered in the bright sunlight overhead. Each woman breathed out an exhale of complete and utter awe.

“Magnificent,” Romana said under her breath. “Simply magnificent.” There was a light slap on her arm from her right that worked in tandem with a chuckle of pure amusement. She looked to one side. “Yes, Rose?”

Rose’s amusement was crystal clear. Her eyes glimmered with incredible amusement and Romana could tell that whatever had amused the woman so much was going to be regaled and retold to others over and over again. She gestured ahead of them. “Check that out. Absolutely brilliant, that is.”

Romana looked up and slightly off to the side. Her entire face lengthened in horror at a the sight of two long banners that hung from the eves down to the ground. An image of a man, standing tall with pride in underneath thick rays of light were blazoned down the banner’s entire length. The words “Irving Braxiatel” written underneath in text that stood taller than any man or woman who might wander past, eliminated any possible question as to who the man in the picture might be…

…As though Romana wouldn’t have immediately recognised him. 

She dropped her forehead into her palm and let out a moan. “Oh, Brax…” She didn’t bother to swat at Rose’s arm when she heard the click of her phone that said she’d taken a photograph of it. “I’m embarrassed on his behalf,” she admitted.

“Well,” Rose said with a giggle. “This goes to show why he loves you as much as he does. You know what they say, right, you can only love someone as much as you love yourself.” She gestured with both hands toward the banner. “Huh… huh?”

Romana’s head shot up. Her eyes were narrowed with a tight pinch of her brows. “Who in the known universe said something like that?”

“RuPaul, wasn’t it?” Rose said with an expression of thought as she looked upward. “No. hold on. She says: _If you can’t love yourself, then how in the hell are you going to love someone else?_ ” she pressed her lips together, then shrugged. “Close enough, yeah?”

“Hardly,” Romana scoffed in reply. She exhaled hard and shook her head. “Come on, then. No sense in lingering around here for too much longer. The sooner we can find our future selves and return to our current timeline, the better.” She sniffed. “I’m quite discomforted right now.”

“Yes,” Leela agreed with a tight look around them. “I think I feel the same. Something that is hiding in the shadows.”

“Is that the queasy in the gut sensation?” Rose asked quietly. “Like a whole sack of snakes are writhing about in there?”

“That’s the one,” Romana whispered in reply. “There’s something, someone, other than us who is here out of time.” She inhaled deeply and with clear discomfort. “I don’t like it.”

“It is like a hunter,” Leela noted curiously. “A hunter lost on it’s prey and sniffing the air in search of it.”

“Well, let’s just hope we don’t end up in it’s sights,” Rose muttered with a light gulp. Her hand tightened around the phone in the front pocket of her hooded sweater. “I mean, I’ve got Brax on speed dial and all, but the chances of him actually picking up and bringing reinforcements…Well…”

“When will you add _your_ mate to your speed dial?” Romana asked curiously. 

“When he has a number for me to call,” she answered with a shrug. “I mean, yeah, he’s got a phone and all, but the signal’s not compatible with my phone.”

“Do look into rectifying that.”

“I think after today, he just might insist on it.”

They walked quietly up a tall set of marble stairs. Around them, there were plenty of visitors either walking around, or snacking on food whist seated on the steps. Children brandishing bags from the gift shop excitedly cheered about presents purchased for them by their parents shot by them in a dangerous manner. This drew a growl of warning from Leela toward the parents as they passed, but the glare wasn’t met with fear nor a sense that they were intimidated, instead it was a harried look of apology from parents thoroughly exhausted to within an inch of consciousness.

“Seems a popular place,” Rose remarked. “Just what is the collection?”

“Artwork and priceless artifacts from across all time and space,” Romana answered. “Braxiatel has a team of archaeologists at his beck and call. Some of the greatest experts in the universe.” She stepped in front of a door, which whooshed open automatically. “I personally think you’d appreciate it very much, Rose. His collection is quite magnificent.”

They stepped through the doors, and immediately they were washed with crisp cool air from large blowers at the doorway. All three women paused and lifted their heads to enjoy the cool after the brutal heat outside the doors.

“I’m never leavin’ again,” Rose said with a long breath of appreciation. “I’m staying right here for the rest of my life.”

Leela chuckled deeply. “You’ve been away from Gallifrey for too long, Rose. The heat outside is mild compared to the power of two suns over the Gallifreyan landscape.”

“True, true,” she said with a sigh of remembrance. “And, God, I miss it.”

“We all do,” Romana agreed. “But it won’t be too much longer now until we are all home once more.”

A beep to the side of them forced the three women to regain their focus on their forward trajectory. Rose lowered her head to look across an expansive and magnificently furnished lobby. Large paintings filled with faces and landscapes from across the universe adorned the walls. Windows of lead and stained glass threw coloured beams of light across the white polished floors in a perfect lighten rendering of the artwork above their heads.

Rose’s mouth fell into a perfect “O” shape. “Oh my God. This is beautiful,” she purred out longingly.

“Only the most basic, least impressive pieces of art are displayed in the lobby,” Romana revealed softly. “Artwork Brax finds precious, but is not yet of a calibre to warrant full displays within the collection exhibits themselves.”

Rose whimpered out. “Please tell me that there’s a good chance we might have time for a browse around before we head back. Please, Romana.”

“I think you’ll only have to let Brax know you wish to visit and he’ll happily act as your guide.” Romana promised her. She walked them toward a reception desk. “He’s very proud of the collection.”

“Broke plenty of temporal laws in order to build his collection,” Leela noted with a small smile. 

“That he did, Leela,” Romana agreed. She looked toward a smartly dressed woman with light green skin and a head of magnificent fire-red hair pulled up into a high bun. “Good morning. We are looking to seek audience with his Lord Braxiatel. Can you tell me if he is available?”

The woman looked at her with surprise, and maybe slight confusion. “We don’t have a _Lord_ Braxiatel,” she answered cautiously. “Do you mean to speak with our curator: _Irving_ Braxiatel?”

“Yes,” Romana answered with a forced smile. “My apology for the error. On my Planet, persons with his status are generally referred to as Lords.”

The young receptionist nodded slowly and tapped at her ear, where a delicately designed earpiece and microphone were seated. “Diana,” she said after a moment. “I have visitors for Mr. Braxiatel. Would you mind …” her eyes flashed. “Well, no, I didn’t. Please wait a moment, I’ll ask.” She looked up to Romana with an expression of apology. “I’m sorry, do you have an appointment?”

“We don’t,” she admitted with at least a minor attempt at showing apology. “But I do assure you he will see us. Please let him know that Lady Romanadvoratrelundar is here to see him. He knows who I am.”

The receptionist’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

Romana cleared her throat and spoke her name a little slower.

The receptionist gaped just slightly. He eyes had not quite returned to normal size, and she maintained an apologetic look. “I still didn’t quite get that.”

Rose leaned forward. “Tell him that Lady Romana, Honoured President of the High Council of Gallifrey and all of her dominions, is here to see him.” She looked to Romana with a smirk and a shrug as the receptionist recited the information into her earpiece. “Pull out the big guns, Romana.”

“In this timeline I am not President,” she hissed through her teeth.

“Yeah, and in this timeline, you don’t look like _that_ , either.” She reminded her. “You’re from Gallifrey, the highest temporal power in the universe. A planet of time travellers. Surely it can be assumed that any one of you lot could show up at any point in time…”

“A good point,” she replied with a deep sigh and a look to the ceiling. 

A tall woman suddenly appeared through a door at the rear of the reception desk. Her style of dress was immaculate, without a blemish nor a wrinkle in her finely tailored pantsuit. Her eyes were a vivid shade of deep blue that stood out through darkened lashes and a porcelain-white face. Her hair was a light brown and was held back in an elaborate braid that extended down to her lower back. She held a tablet in her arms much like Carein would her clipboard back at the capsules and looked upon the party of three women with an expression that was less than impressed at being interrupted.

“Good morning,” she said almost flatly. “My name is Diana, and I act as assistant to Mr. Braxiatel. I understand you wish to make an appointment to meet with him.” She looked down at her tablet. “Can I ask the nature of your visit? I may have a space available three months from now.”

“Unfortunately, our time here at the Collection is very limited,” Romana replied with a small smile. “And my reason for seeking audience with Mr. Braxiatel is of an urgent nature that really cannot wait for three months.”

“It’s all I’ve got,” she said with a shrug. “Take it or leave it. He’s a very busy man.”

“Yes,” Romana drolled out. “I expect that he is.” She lifted her chin. “But if you let him know who I am, he will make the time to meet with me.”

“The Lady President of Gallifrey,” Diana said with doubt. She looked to Romana tiredly. “Nice try, of course, but I happen to know that the current president of Gallifrey is male, not female.”

“You are aware that Gallifrey is a planet of time travellers,” Rose offered with a tilt of her head. “As in able to materialise anywhere within all time and space at whim?”

Diana shot a look toward Rose. “Mr. Braxiatel is unavailable today. If you would like to book an appointment to see him in three months time, then perhaps you can use your time machine to jump ahead to that time.” She pressed her finger to her lip. “Or better yet, you could go back in time, make an appointment for today, and meet with him.”

“Wow,” Rose said with a straightening of her back and a stunned look on her face. “Does Brax know you’re such a rude bit-“

“What my fellow lady of time means to say,” Romana shot in quickly to cover up the name she knew Rose was going to use. “Is that if you could possibly find any small amount of time that Mr. Braxiatel has available…”

“Which is none,” Diana affirmed sharply. Her eyes were narrowed on Rose. “It’s Mr. Braxiatel, not _Brax_.”

“I think the fact that I call him Brax might indicate we’re friends, yeah?” Rose ventured with a smile.

“Yes, and apparently Mr. Braxiatel has plenty of friends,” she replied. “Strangely none of them he’s ever met or can remember meeting.”

Rose sighed and looked upward knowing that in this case Diana was right. 

“Please,” Romana pressed. “This is a very important manner. All I ask you to do is to let Lord Braxiatel know that Romana needs to see him…”

“You refer to him as Lord?” Diana asked curiously.

“Of course, I do,” Romana snapped out with annoyance. “He is a _Time Lord_ , that is his title on Gallifrey – of which I am President. Now I believe I have been _very_ patient with your screening nonsense. But my patience is at an end. I insist that you tell Brax that Romanadvoratrelundar, President of the High Council of Gallifrey needs to see him. The matter is urgent, and I will not take no for an answer.”

A commotion at the doorway captured the attention of the three women, of the receptionist, and of Diana. In through the automatic glass doors stalked a woman who was clearly incensed. Her dark hair, cut to her shoulders in such a way that it looked like it could have been done with the large hunting knife she wore in a holster at her thigh, swung violently with each forward stride. Her eyes were narrowed and bright with fury, and as she walked, she seemed to leave a light cloud of fine light dust in her wake.

“Diana, I don’t want your bullshit about Braxiatel being too busy for me today,” she snarled angrily toward the woman behind the desk. “You will tell him I’m here to see him, and you will cancel any appointments he has for the rest of his life, because I’m going to kill him…”

Romana scoffed. “If you don’t mind, we were here first…”

“No no,” Rose said with a chuckle. “Let’s see how this plays out.”

“If she wishes to kill Braxiatel,” Leela hissed through her teeth. “Then she will stand in line behind me.”

The woman looked toward Romana. The fury she felt toward Braxiatel almost immediately transferred to the Time Lady. “You can wait, darling,” she snarled with a flick of her eyes back toward Diana. “What I want to do to him is a little more elevated in priority than what pretty little offer you’ve got for him.” She slammed her hand on the counter. “Where is he?”

“Bernice,” Braxiatel’s voice boomed in almost excitedly from the entrance to the Collection, to the left of where all four women waited. “I didn’t expect you back for at least another two weeks! How was your dig; find anything interesting?”

She unsheathed her knife from her holster and growled as she stalked threateningly toward him. “Oh, you know I didn’t find a damn thing.” She charged him.

Bernice made it only to within ten feet of him before being stopped with the sharp flat blade of an ancient weapon pressed against her throat. “I cannot allow you to kill him,” Leela growled against her ear. “Unless he falls on my blade, Braxiatel is protected.”

Bernice gasped with shock. “What the hell?” She looked toward Braxiatel, whose eyes were wide and his jaw low with surprise. “Brax?”

His eyes were on Leela and were full of longing, remembrance and even sadness toward a lifetime lost long ago. He quickly shook off that expression and attempted to force a smile. “Leela, Leela, Leela,” he said with a surprisingly calm and clear voice. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

“Hello Braxiatel,” she said in reply through her teeth. Her eyes gestured toward woman in hr hold. “What would you like me to do with her?”

His eyes flashed. “Oh. Oh, yes. Release her, please. Bernice is a dear friend and much like you, she threatens to kill me on a rather frequent basis.”

“I see,” she replied as she snapped open her arms and took a step backward. She looked to Bernice with a look of apology, but said nothing more. Instead, she stepped backward to stand ahead of, but between Rose and Romana. 

Braxiatel’s eyes followed Leela’s backward walk. His gaze first shifted toward Rose, and the somewhat friendly look of recognition she held within her eyes toward him. “And who have we here, then?” he queried with a curious smile and pinch in his eye. He then looked toward Romana – at least two incarnations ahead of the woman he’d sacrificed it all for more than a decade prior. His breath caught and his voiced softened toward awe.

“My Lady Romana.” He exhaled and drew in a hard breath. “You. You’re here. How?”

“Hello Brax,” she answered him with a gentle smile and a lift in her chin. “It’s been a while.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	49. Cancel Everything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax cancels all of his appointments for the day...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seems to be a Monday thing of late, but ...sighhhh... something came up that rendered me unable to function like a reasonable human being, which is why I missed yesterday.... 
> 
> Doing much better today , though.. 
> 
> Not quite sure how to describe this chapter to you except to say: Brax isn't an idiot.... well, at least Early-Brax isn't. 
> 
> Very much hope that you enjoy!

~~oooOOOooo~~

Romana: the love of his lives, the holder of his hearts, the one he sacrificed it all for… The woman who would never know just how much these old hearts of his beat for her…

He felt a shift inside his chest, an irregular beat of his hearts, but did his very best to hide any potential emotion he suffered at the sight of her. So much older than she was when he last saw har, and certainly a couple of regenerations passed, but she still looked as magnificent to him as she always had…

…And it hurt him inside.

“Welcome to my collection,” he managed out after a short moment of contemplation. He did it with a smile and a light bow toward her. “Would you like a private tour?”

“ _I_ would,” Rose said with a light peep inside her voice, which she quickly suppressed with a clearing of her throat and a lightly chagrinned expression upon realising the offer was for Romana and not her. “Sorry,” she muttered lightly.

Braxiatel shifted his eyes toward her. There was light suspicion in his eyes, a curiosity, but not an ounce of the familiarity of warmth that she was used to from him.

…And _that_ hurt.

“And who do we have here?” he asked with a half-smile as he took a step toward her. “A female incarnation of Narvin?”

“No,” Rose answered with a forced, yet friendly smile. “She’s back on – “

“On Gallifrey,” Romana interrupted very quickly, and with sharpness to her tone directed toward Rose. “This is Rose. A very very dear friend of mine.”

“Then a friend of yours must surely be a friend of mine,” Braxiatel said with a smile. He held out his right hand to Rose, his palm upward, in request for hers. “Allow me to introduce myself to you formally. I’m Irving Braxiatel. Owner of this collection, and once upon a time a close confident and advisor to the very lovely Lady Romanadvoratrelundar.”

Rose kept her smile in place and lifted her left hand to place it palm down atop his. “Rose,” she said with a tone as formal as the one he used. “Rose Tyler. I’m afraid that I don’t have anything as interesting to say about myself as you do.”

His eyes shifted to her hand, and to the ring she wore on the fourth finger of that hand. “Oh,” he breathed out as he dipped his head to press a kiss to her knuckles. “Somehow, I very much doubt that.” He then lifted his eyes to hers, drew the pad of his thumb lightly across the glistening rock and released her hand. He straightened up to a stand and looked toward Romana. “And to what do I owe the honour of your visit?”

“Well,” Romana began with a stiffening in her back and a lift in her chin. “It isn’t something that I wish to discuss with you in public.” She pointedly looked around them. “It is of a rather delicate nature I am sure you understand.”

“Indeed,” he agreed gently. “It usually is.” Friendliness had shifted toward business, and he held open his arm in a request for the three of them to follow him into the offices. “After you, my Lady.”

“Mr. Braxiatel,” Diana called from the desk. “I’m very sorry, but you have an appointment with…”

“Cancel it,” he answered without looking toward her, his eyes locked on Romana. “Cancel everything for today.” He drew in a deep breath to look at his assistant. He lifted his chin high and held back his shoulders with the pride he wore in the halls of the Capitol. “This is the Lady Romana, President of the high Council of Gallifrey. Her needs override the needs of all others across this universe. If my Lady wishes to meet with me, then she will immediately possess all of my most devoted attention for as long as she requires.”

“How very kind of you,” Romana answered with a smile. She stepped forward and held up her hand in a gesture to ask him to lead her by the hand. An unusual gesture from her, but not one he would ever question or deny.

“Brax,” Bernice growled from behind him. “Don’t you ignore the fact _I_ want to speak with you as well.”

“Actually,” he said with a light sigh in his voice when he dropped Rmana’s hand and turned to address Bernice properly. “You want to kill me. As it does appear that I am needed right now – _alive_ \- you murdering me really must wait for the time being, I do hope you understand.” He looked toward Diana. “Please see that you schedule an appointment space for an assassination attempt by Ms. Summerfield for sometime this afternoon.” He looked back to Bernice. “Will that be okay with you?”

“You incredibly facetious bastard,” she seethed in reply as she folded her arms across her chest. She pursed her lips with mild defeat and let out a huff. “Fine.” She shot a glare toward Diana. “Preferably not too late, if you don’t mind. I’ve got a busy day planned post-assassination, and I’d like to get to it as quickly as possible.”

Diana offered her a glare, but said nothing as she turned on her heel, listed her nose high, and stalked back out toward the offices.

Bernice smirked. “Do you think it might be worth my time to stick around just outside her cubicle, remaining just within her line of sight as a reminder that I got in a win against her today?”

“Oh, I like the way you think,” Rose said with a chuckle. “I say go for it. It’s a better option than dying of heat exhaustion outside. Better yet: Make her make you a coffee or something.”

“And now I’m liking the way that _you_ think,” Bernice said with a smirk. “You certainly can’t be Gallifreyan with an attitude like that.”

“Nope,” she sang. “ _Human_ , actually.” She flicked her eyes toward Braxiatel when he made an odd sound at that, but on noting no real switch in his expression, shrugged and looked back to Bernice. “Earth. London. Late 20th Century.”

“ _Really_? Then how’d you end up as a…” She looked to Romana and the proud stoic manner of her. “As a _companion_ to the leader of them all?”

“Married one.” Rose answered with a shrug. “Like she did.” Rose gestured toward Leela, whose eyes were curiously taking in the large blade holstered at Bernice’s thigh.

“I see,” Bernice answered with a light smirk. “Not very consistent with what I know of Time Lords.” She angled her head to one side with light analysis. “Not that I suppose I’ve had all that much interaction with them to know beyond my archeological texts on the matter. Aside from my dealings with the Doctor, I can’t say I’ve really ever encountered one.”

Rose’s brows pinched with confusion on that. “No? But you…” Her eyes flicked toward Braxiatel; who’s expression seemed to fall toward warning. Her eyes then widened, and she cleared her throat uncomfortably. “Ehm. So, the _Doctor_ , you say?”

“Yes,” she answered with a smile. “Know of him, do you?”

“Know _of_ him?” Rose answered with an amused expression. “Well, yes. He’s…”

“The Doctor is a close friend of mine,” Romana interrupted almost harshly. “And therefore, Rose has had the occasion to be in the Doctor’s presence from time to time.” Her eyes hardened in warning toward Rose, then softened once she saw the chagrinned expression cross her face. “Now, I believe we’ve wasted enough time with niceties. We should really concentrate on what brought us to the Collection in the first place. If we have time, then meet and greet can occur later.”

Rose pursed her lips and lowered her head. “Yes, my Lady,” she smoothed out with as little facetiousness in her tone as she could manage. “My apology.”

Bernice’s face tightened up in wince of empathy for the obvious reprimand. “Yes. Well, perhaps I’ll take a seat and see if the Iron Maiden known as Diana will fix me with a coffee. She shifted her eyes to the doorway. “Now. If I could get her to put a shot of whiskey in it…”

“Pretty sure Brax might have a bottle of the prime stuff hidden in his office somewhere.” Rose offered with a smile. She inhaled a hiccup at yet another warning of her name from Romana, and winced. 

“I’m pretty sure you’re right,” Bernice agreed. She looked to Braxiatel. “Well?”

He huffed out, his eyes lifting his to the towering ceiling above. “You know where to find it. Go right ahead. Indulge. Perhaps it will make you a little less inclined to be so murderous…”

“Yeah, don’t be too confident of that outcome.”

“I await with eagerness and anticipation,” he drawled out with a smirk and a polite, yet dismissive, tip of his head.

Romana watched the exchange with interest and somewhat rapt fascination. There was a slight sense of friendly comradery between this Bernice woman and Braxiatel that seemed a little out of sorts for this particular incarnation of him. Her recollection was that he was more apt to show distain toward humans, and she was fairly certain that this Bernice person was human. It made her somwehtat curious as to whether or not their relationship was actually deeper than a simple working friendship.

A very small part of her reared up territorially and she found herself having to fight somewhat against that feeling growing from overtaking her. It took effort, which surprised her. In their centuries together, never once had she felt a sense of territorialism toward Braxiatel. She was far too secure in his love for her to ever fall toward that…

…Of course, this part of his timeline was before Braxiatel had pledged himself to her with a proposal for marriage and bonding. Perhaps that was it. This woman represented a true challenge and a rival to her.

She looked upward toward him and noted a light and somewhat amused sparkle inside his incredibly deep blue eyes. She felt the flat of his hand touch at her lower back and the light stroke of his thumb against her spine and felt the wave of territorialism fade away just slightly.

“Come with me,” he said invitationally, in a voice less formal than usual. “To my office where we can get some privacy.”

“So?” Romana queried softly with a true attempt to appear quite nonchalant. “Bernice, is she…?”  
  


“A very dear friend,” he answered quickly to save her from having to really reach inside her to formalize the question. “Nothing more than that.”

“There is, of course, nothing wrong with it being anything more than that,” Romana offered softly. “You are free to explore your options without judgment, least of all from me.”

He expelled a loud and single laugh at that. “Oh, my dear Romana. You are obviously spending far too much time in the presence of my brother. His method of exploration is closer to what I believe that you’re implying I may wish to engage in.” The very edge of his mouth tipped up at the smallest of peeps from the blonde woman walking behind him. “Although whether or not he has engaged in such activities is not something I am aware of, nor do I wish to be made aware of it.”

He pressed the flat of his hand against an ornately carved wooden door to push it open. He stepped back to allow each of the three women to step inside ahead of him. “After you,” he offered with a somewhat sly smile. “Do take a seat.”

Romana stepped in first, with Leela following closely behind her. Rose moved in last and paused with a gasp just across the threshold of his office. It was majesty above anything else she’d seen. A bookcase of quite obviously ancient Gallifreyan origins sat against the back wall. Delicate and magnificent carvings in colours that seemed to compliment the white Cadonwood were tucked within its shelves. The walls were adorned with brilliant landscape paintings, both in oils and acrylic, with one painting having a true 3D effect to it. It seemed that as she leaned to the left and to the right, it shifted with her.

“A magnificent painting, isn’t it?” he asked against her ear as he came up behind her. Unable to politely move around her through the doorway without having to inappropriately, he felt it best to let her know he was waiting behind her. “One of only two such paintings created by Lord Usemekunigass of the house of Redloom about, oh, three thousand years ago.”

“Relative time to your current line,” Rose breathed out appreciatively. 

“Relative to now, yes,” he answered. “Do you recognise the landscape inside the image?”

“It seems to be an imagining of the cliffs that overlook Mount Perdition,” she answered with awe. “Not quite picture perfect, but a beautiful interpretation of the area.”

“You’re familiar with the mountains?”

“My husband took me there shortly before our son was born. I fell in love with the area and her people.”

“A son?” he queried with a breath of light surprise. “How delightful for you both.”

“We have a son and a daughter,” she said somewhat distractedly, unable to take her eyes off the image and the memories that it drew from deep inside her mind. “God, that’s beautiful.” She looked at him then, belatedly realising he was looking to move past her. She stepped to the side and watched him walk to his desk. “Why isn’t it in the main gallery? Something like that – it needs to be on display for everyone to see.”

“Not this,” he admitted almost sadly as he took a seat on a tall backed leather chair. “There are some things I do wish to keep privately and within permanent sight.” He looked at the image. “And it’s really the only artistic or photographic imagining I have of home. As I am no longer able to look upon the Mountains, the red grasses, or the orange night sky of my planet, I prefer to keep this painting within my own personal collection here in my office.” He gestured toward a vacant chair between Romana and Leela. “Now if you don’t mind, please take a seat.”

“And why not?” she asked with light confusion in her tone as she weaved behind Leela to take the vacant seat. “Don’t you have your capsule? Why can’t you go home?”

Romana put her hand atop Rose’s and looked apologetically toward Braxiatel. “At this moment in Braxiatel’s timeline, Gallifrey is close to completely inhabitable. Rife with the Dogma Virus and a political system in utter turmoil.” She swallowed with sympathy toward the light cloud inside his blue eyes. “Am I right, Brax?”

He nodded slowly and shifted his eyes toward Rose. “The circumstances for my being here has left me without the ability to transport back to Gallifrey.” His smile was weak and rueful. “No capsule, I’m afraid. She’s stuck on a planetoid in a timeline that is inaccessible to me right now.”

Rose shot a look of pleading toward Romana. “We can take him to her, can’t we? He can’t be denied Gallifrey, nor the chance to have his ship humming inside his head.” She swallowed and her eyes fell. “And the ship, she can’t be left all alone without her pilot. She must be in so much pain.”

“Quite sensitive to the capsules, aren’t you?” he noted curiously. “Or just her specifically?”

“All of them,” Romana clarified. “Rose has a – oh how should I put this – an _affinity_ toward all travel capsules. Quite remarkable, really.”

“Particularly for a _human_ ,” he remarked with a lift in his brow.

“Wondering if I should be offended by that,” she groused just slightly.

“Not at all,” he assured her with a light smirk. “I am impressed, not abhorred.” He looked toward Romana with a smile. “So, my Lady. What brings you to my collection, and just how far ahead in my future are you right now?”

“I think my timeline and where we are right now is irrelevant,” she answered somewhat coolly. “As to the purpose of our visit.” She drew in a breath. “We’re looking for you assistance in locating two of our people who are lost in this specific temporal location.”

“There are no Time Lords on this planetoid,” he answered coldly. “At least, not any from _this_ dimension.”

Her brows lifted in question. “And what do you mean by that, Braxiatel?”

“I mean precisely what I said,” he answered. “There are no Gallifreyans from this dimension on KS-159.”

“Which leaves the possibility open toward Gallifreyans from another dimension?” she queried worriedly.

“I believe you might know of which specific Gallifreyan I am referring to,” he replied carefully. 

“This cannot be true,” Leela breathed out worriedly. “He is here, at the collection?”

Rose shot a look to Leela. “Who?”

“He is,” Braxiatel confirmed with a dark voice and a nod of his head, completely ignoring Rose’s question. “Although, granted, not inside the collection itself. I have very tight security here in this facility. Noone gets in if I don’t want them to.”

“But he exists within your periphery?” Romana queried with worry. “Biding his time for now?”

Rose leaned back in her chair. She was tempted to ask again who they seemed to be so concerned about, but it was clear it was a question that wasn’t going to be answered. Best to remain quiet and simply listen instead.

Noone seemed to notice he existence right now, and she felt it was understandable.

“How long has it been?” Romana asked. “And have you been forced to remain in here for that entire time?”

“Thirteen years,” he answered her, then shook his head. “And no. I haven’t spent that whole time holed up in the Collection. I still come and go as I please.”

“But warily,” Romana offered with a sigh.

“Then you should point me in his direction,” Leela said with a growl. “I shall eliminate the threat he has placed on you with my knives in his hearts. No longer will you be at threat.”

“If it was that easy, the threat would have been eliminated years ago,” Braxiatel said with a light frown. “But despite his insistence in killing me, I can’t say I have the same fixation, nor desire, to do the same to him. After all, Leela, his is still my-”

“He is an assassin,” Romana snapped sharply. “Of another dimension, and one who certainly didn’t have the care that you have toward him.”

“Well then,” he replied somewhat coolly. “Despite assertions otherwise, I do have morals that he seems to lack, don’t I?”

Romana lifted her hand to her forehead and rubbed at her brows. “And you are still his target then?”

“It seems not,” he answered with a sigh. “At least not with effort that is in any way concerted. The Burner was trying to eliminate a temporal anomaly, of which I am not.” He drew in a breath. “At least not here at any rate.” His eyes shifted upward. “The same cannot be said for the three of you, however.” His eyes shifted toward Rose, who seemed far more interested in the paintings adorning his office walls that she was on a conversation she’d assumed didn’t concern her in anyway. “And _her_ …”

“What about her?” Romana asked in a voice of low warning.

“Oh,” he sang out with a shake in his head. “No particular reason. A human emitting the telepathic signature of a Time Lord is in no way a temporal anomaly.”

Rose flicked her eyes toward him. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Rose is telepathically bonded with a Time Lord,” Romana insisted. “His signature is hers.”

“Doesn’t quite work like that,” he said on a quiet voice. His eyes flicked toward her in warning when she looked to argue. “I was a professor in the telepathic arts at the Academy, Romana. Do remember that, will you, when you attempt to imply that I’m an idiot who doesn’t understand simple telepathy.”

“I make no such implication,” she defended with a narrowing in her eyes. “You’ve proven to me on more than one occasion your telepathic and hypnotic mastery.”

“Then watch the stories you decide to tell,” he warned her. “Because if you require my assistance, then I will need full disclosure. I don’t wish to send any of you toward danger because I’m not aware of all of the circumstances that have brought you here in the first place.” He blinked slowly. “Particularly what’s brought you here without your mates at your side. Is this about them; are they in peril?”

Romana shook her head. “No. This has nothing to do with the Lords who are the beats of our hearts,” she assured him. “They are safe and are currently unaware of our absence. This trip, and the purpose of, is strictly to do with…” She inhaled deeply. “To do with the safety of the future of ourselves.”

The sound of Daddy Cool singing from Rose’s phone stood to argue with Romana’s assertion on that.

Braxiatel’s eyes shot wide with shock, disgust, and question toward the sound. “Rassilon, what _is_ that terrible sound?”

“Call me that name again,” Rose warned as she pulled her phone from her pocket. “And I’ll join your friend outside in wanting to murder you.” She dropped the phone, face down, on the desk. “Romana? Do I ignore him or pick up?” she asked with a rather terrified look at the phone.

Her eyes were wide with horror on the device on the desk. “Ignore him,” she answered with a hoarse and breathy voice.

“Yeah, okay. Not like he ever answers his when I call,” Rose said with a shrug.

Braxiatel looked intrigued, though not entirely happily so. “Ignoring your mate, Rose?” he queried her with a pinch in his eye.

“No,” she said slowly. “My brother in law.”

He exhaled a huff that was as much a chuckle as it was a sound of understanding. “You don’t get along with him, I take it?”

She lifted her eyes to him and gave him a one-sided smile. “Quite the opposite. He’s my best friend, and I love him very, very deeply.” She swallowed thickly. “Just right now, I imagine he’s a little on the side of annoyed, and I don’t like being on his bad side.”

“None of us do,” Romana said with a sigh.

“Like _you_ ever are,” Rose countered with a side glance at him.

“You would be surprised,” Romana corrected her.

“Then tell me why he’s calling me and not you,” Rose asked her, a frustrated expression finally making it into her façade. “I can already hear his rant, you know.” She cleared her throat and pulled out her very best impression of the current incarnation of her brother in law. “ _Whatever madness you have engaged in with my wife, whatever jeopardy friendly escapade you have convinced her to join you in will end now. The both of you, my brother and yourself, are a terrible influence upon her and I will not have it_.” She huffed out and waved her hand. “Insert his favourite choices of Gallifreyan swears and threats to have me permanently grounded if he has to come rescue us from whatever trouble we’re getting into…Probably already in his capsule trying to trace the phone connection.”

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Romana said with a huff and a shake in his head. “I very much doubt…”

“No,” Leela offered. “I am going to agree with Rose with her impression of your husband. I do think that is very close to what he will say if she was to answer his call.”

The phone sang out again. Both Romana and Rose actually quickly shifted their chairs backward just slightly in reaction to it.

“He’s not going to give up,” Rose said with a huff. She looked up at her friend with a light narrow in her eyes as she shifted to one side to pull her airpods from her pocket. She quickly slipped them into her ears, which quickly silenced the phone. “I’m going to take this, and we can settle this question once and for all.”

“Do so outside, please?” Romana asked with apology in her eyes.

“Yeah,” Rose replied with a deep sigh as she rose from the seat and slid the chair backward with the backs of her knees. Her eyed flicked to the man seated across the table. “Do excuse me, Mr. Braxiatel. I should take this.”

“Indeed,” he breathed out with somewhat darkened eyes as he watched her thumb to accept the phone with a wince as she left the room.

“Yeah, yeah,” she chided the caller. “Gods, you’re a persistent one, aren’t you?” Her face tightened into a deep wince before she closed the door behind her.

Romana shared a look with Leela and exhaled a long sigh as she looked back toward Braxiatel. “Now. Where were we?”

His return look was one of forced neutrality, although it was clear he was highly intrigued. “So. You are mated to the brother of Rose’s husband?”

“I am,” she confirmed. “But that is not relevant.”

“Oh,” he half purred. There was a twinkle in his eye. “I think it might be.”

“Hardly,” she corrected him. “Now, as I saw saying before my husband called. We’ve come to you for assistance in locating a couple of ladies that are important to the futures of both Rose and myself.”

“Okay,” he answered, his expression immediately shifting toward business. “Can you tell me the names of these women?”

“No,” Romana answered slowly. “I don’t know what names they might be using.”

“Right,” he said with a light lift in his brows. “Gallifreyan?”

“No,” Romana answered. There was a light crease in her brow. “And I can’t really say if I know what species they are, either.” She lifted her hand and dropped her mouth into her palm. “I can’t even tell you what they look like.”

“Really didn’t think this one out all that thoroughly, did you?” Braxiatel asked with his brows high on his forehead.

“One of them would look like Rose,” Leela offered with a look toward Romana. “Wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, her lack of thought on just who they expected to be seeking finally dawning. “She may have regenerated.”

“Rose cannot regenerate,” Leela corrected her. “She is human.”

“Not anymore,” Romana admitted. 

“I’m sorry?”

“After the accident, when she was almost killed…” She swallowed and inhaled a deep breath. “Please understand, Leela. He had no choice. She would’ve died if her didn’t do it.”

“Who?” Leela asked with slowly rising anger. “And what did he do to her?” She drew in a deep breath. “Did he even give her the choice?”

“I don’t know the full circumstance of it,” Romana answered with both hands raised to seek calm from Leela. “It happened three hundred years in our future. I wasn’t there. I only know what I was told about it when she was returned to our timeline.”

“That does not make it better,” Leela said with a growl. “Does Rose know about this?”

She shook her head. “No, she doesn’t.” She drew in a breath. “Noone in our timeline does. Only Lord Phiroi and I know.”

“So you lie to her. You lie to your own husband?” she warned with fury in her tone. “Is there no end at all to the lies and deceit of your people.”

“Leela, please?” Romana pleaded. “Now is not the time.”

“And it is never the time for truth for your people, is it, Romana?” She pressed her hands into the desktop to push herself to a stand, pausing before she could rise. “I had had enough of these lies your people tell. I will not be part of it anymore.”

“Leela,” Romana pleaded almost desperately. “Please, I need your help with this.”

“No,” she growled. “I am finished with all of this.”

“Leela,” Braxiatel said sternly.

She shifted her eyes to his. “No, Braxiatel. I will not change my mind.”

“Look at me,” he commanded firmly, locking his eyes with hers. There was a slight pause. “You are now in a trance,” he said coolly. “Sit down until I tell you to wake.”

Romana’s eyes flashed with anger as Leela did as commanded and sat in her seat. “Brax! You hypnotised her. How _could_ you?””

“Don’t,” he warned her with a lift of his finger. “The both of you have left me with no choice. Leela was about to storm out of here, no doubt ready to reveal to Rose what it is clear you want to remain hidden. She would then disappear without so much as a trace, leaving both you and Rose unprotected.” He huffed out. “As much as this planetoid is relatively safe from harm, the Doctor of the alternate universe still lingers, still hungry for a kill. If he gets the sense that his mate of an alternate universe is not only outside of her timeline, but an anomaly across all time and space…”

“Brax,” she warned low.

“Use your warning tone with me all that you want to try and tell me I’m wrong about that, Romana,” he said with frustration. “But you cannot deny that my brother has mated himself with a temporal anomaly. Hardly surprising, really, given who he is…”

“How did you know?” she queried with a pinch in her eye.

He exhaled hard in reply to that. “Because I’m not a juvenile who doesn’t know any better. I’m far more experienced in this than you are, Romana. All due respect to you, of course, but I have six-hundred more years of being a subscriber to the laws of time than you, and in that time have certainly developed a strong sense of…”

“Oh, don’t give me that nonsense,” she snapped with a growl in her voice. “I am also not a juvenile Academy Cadet in need of an admonishment from an elder.”

He rolled his eyes. “She wears my mother’s ring,” he answered her. Which was specifically gifted to Thete before she passed for him to give to his true chosen mate when his arranged marriage fell apart. It was one of the very few items that he’s guarded that fiercely. For her to wear it means that she holds his hearts in a way no other ever could.”

“It’s true,” She admitted with a nod of her head. “She is his entire universe, and he is hers.”

“Then you’ll have to agree that if this alternate Doctor senses the bond, he will use it to his advantage, and eliminate the temporal anomaly she represents.” He drew in a deep breath. “And if you dare try to intervene, it will put you at risk as well. I won’t risk you, Romana. I will not allow you to come to harm.” His eyes drifted toward the desktop in a gesture toward her belly. He looked back up to her, his eyes soft and reverent. “Especially not in your condition.” 

“What condition is that?” she asked quietly. “I have no condition to speak of.”

“I was your closest confident for nearly two centuries,” he reminded her gently. “My hearts have beat for you for far longer than that. I knew you better than I knew myself.” He extended his arm across his desk, hoping that she’d put her hand in his. “You can hide yourself from anyone else, Romana, but you can’t hide from me. You can never hide from me.”

She placed her hand in his and exhaled a sigh of his name. She didn’t say anything else but felt a sense of comfort when his fingers curled around hers.

“I am the one who stands as your mate; your husband. That’s _my_ child inside your womb.” His mouth flicked up to a smile. “And I don’t know if that’s a more terrifying thought than the knowledge that we actually engage in activities required to create that child.”

“Regularly,” she admitted with a wink.

“Rassilon,” he breathed out. “What changed my mind on that?”

She chuckled lightly at that. “Well. Regenerating into a more tactile incarnation helped. And as your brother was prone to saying to you: Don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it.”

“How utterly devastating that I followed _his_ advice.”

“I don’t think so,” she said with an almost shy sweep of her hair over her ear. “The new _us_ is remarkable, Irving, it really is.”

His breath escaped him in a shudder not only to hear her call him by his given name, but to see her in such a vulnerable state. “Your beauty, and the way you hold my hearts is truly my undoing, Romana. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”

“Can I count on you to help us now?”

“It would be my honour,” he answered her gently. “My Lady’s wish is certainly my command.” He stroked her knuckles with his thumb, holding the moment for just a little bit longer. He then drew in a breath and released her hand to sit back in his chair. “Tell me everything, Romana. All of it. Don’t leave anything out. I’ll see what resources I can pull together to help you as best I can.” He flicked his eyes to Leela. “Then I’ll see what I can do to make her forget what she heard.”

“Lying to her yet again,” she said with genuine regret and sadness.

“The unfortunate side effect of being amongst Time Lords,” he agreed ruefully. “I’m very sorry, Romana.”

“So am I.”

Both jumped in shock as the door to the office slammed open to reveal a livid-red Rose Tyler still arguing with an animated face on the screen of her phone. A harsh series of Gallifreyan words, the word-by-word translation into English being equivalent to her ordering the other individual to go copulate with an identical genome, and that particular genome could be found at the capsule field flew angrily from her mouth. She then issued another order of an equal profane nature that had Braxiatel gasp in horror behind his desk, and rudely cut off the conversation with an angry swipe of her thumb. To further accent her unhappiness to the conversation, she slammed the phone facedown on the desktop.

“That man is an absolute fucking arsehole at times,” she growled.

“That’s actually the least offensive thing you’ve said inside the last ten seconds,” Braxiatel spluttered with shock. He swallowed thickly. “Did you really just tell me to … to …. Where did you even _learn_ to speak like that? Surely not from your mate?”

“From _him_ ,” she snapped in reply with a gesture toward the phone as she flopped down into her seat and let out a long groan. “Who else?.” She looked to the woman seated at her side. “If he dares call back, Romana, you’re talking to him, not me.” She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her forehead in her hands. “Leela, you have all my permission to neuter him when we get back, yeah? He doesn’t need it anymore.” 

When Leela didn’t respond Rose nudged her with her elbow. She didn’t lift her head from her hands, instead she kept her lean low and defeated. “Leela. Kill. Murder. Maim.” Again, there was no response, and Rose lifted her head and shoulders to look across at Leela. She looked stunned to find that Leela was seated still and silent, her eyes open wide, but without focus. “Leela?”

“She is in a trance,” Romana answered.

“A trance?” Rose asked with confusion. “Why would she be in a trance? I mean _how_?”

Romana took Rose’s hand in both of hers and gave her a weak smile. “Rose. I think it’s time we had a little discussion about what really happened to you on Gallifrey three hundred years from now.” She looked toward Braxiatel. “And then we need to figure out how we move forward from here to save our future, and the beats of our husband’s hearts.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	50. Jase and Jamie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meanwhile, back on Estrail... Braxiatel seethes, Phiroi contemplates, and Narvin can't sleep...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, I know, you were all expecting a continuation of the happenings at the Collection. Sorry to disappoint. Needed to pull in a couple of characters to help out a little with the mischief that shall ensure back at the collection when a certain curly-haired Time Lord gets a whiff of things foot on KS-159. So that said, a wee bit of set up and introduction needed to happen. 
> 
> Again, sorry to disappoint. Back to the collection tomorrow ... :)

~~oooOOOOooo~~

The firepit that extended along a path of at least twenty feet had finally died down to a pit of glowing embers that crackled and hissed with invitation for any drunken individual to bravely walk across them. Fortunately for he and his team, Lord Phiroi hadn’t had to deal with any members of the new township of Gallifrey accepting that invitation. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t in some way considering accepting the challenge of walking barefoot along crackling embers. It was a somewhat irrational temptation to face danger head on that cursed through his muscles right now. He couldn’t explain why the thought had even entered his mind, or why it was so tempting to kick off his boots and stride across the pit. Sanity, of course, forbade him from acting on that temptation. Images of the injuries he’d sustain and the pain of burns on the soles of very busy feet were deterrent enough for him.

Something else within him was already burning hotly enough. Burning more than ember-seared soles of his feet ever could. Another irrationality that he couldn’t explain at all. An irrationality that would be dangerous if he even _tried_ to explain or make sense of it. If he breathed word of it to anyone at the encampment, it would very likely result in a slow demise at the hands of the Universe’s most calculated and deadly man. So calculated and cold in the kill that he would either cycle him through every single regeneration he had left, or would exhaust him of the entire cycle in an instant…

…He’d rather hand himself over to Rassilon and let the old man erase him from existence than to face an incandescent and furious Irving Braxiatel with a staser in his hand.

A voice muttering in a low level seething tone of utter fury had Phiroi lift his eyes from the embers to look across the pit. Speak of the Devil….

Braxiatel was clearly incensed as he jabbed his finger into the face of his phone, angrily swiped to one side, and uttered out curses that would make every single one of the ancestors who created the language of the Time Lords roll inside their Matrix graves.

“Do mind your language,” he felt the need to warn across the fire toward the man. “Not all of us appreciate the dialect crafted by our ancestors being used in such a profane manner.”

Braxiatel looked up from his phone, a shift of his eyes, to look toward Phiroi. Lit only by the glow of the phone against the darkest part of an Estralian night, his features took on a particularly terrifying visage. If Phiroi had felt fear toward the image of an irate Braxiatel before, this certainly heightened that fear by a few folds. “By the Gods, you look like Hell, Cardinal.”

“When you find yourself mated to a woman who allows herself to be influenced and pulled into harm’s way by a thoughtless, irresponsible, stupid, and rash human hell bent on killing the lot of them, then I suspect you might just emanate the same haunted look of death as I am.”

Phiroi’s expression shifted toward annoyance when Braxiatel walked around the edge of the firepit to approach him.

“You insult your mate,” he breathed out darkly.

“No,” Braxiatel corrected harshly. “I’m insulting Rose...” He held up a finger in warning. “And before you judge, do note that she just told me that I should go _copulate_ with myself, then _copulate_ off.”

“If you spoke to her in a hostile manner with the name calling you just said now, then I don’t blame her,” Phiroi muttered with annoyance. “It also might be worth you considering just who the instigator of whatever misdeed has infuriated you before you assign blame.” He exhaled hard. “Our Lady Rose courts danger in a mostly unintentional manner, usually at the hand of others who pull her toward their mischief.”

Braxiatel’s eyes darkened into a blackness that rivalled the night sky overhead. “Excuse me?”

Phiroi shifted his gaze back to the embers that glowed hotly in the pit. “As you obviously require a more detailed explanation usually reserved for the more junior minded of species, let me elaborate.” He looked toward Braxiatel with a measure of annoyance in his glare. “Rose is a follower, not a leader. It is her hand that is _taken_ toward danger, not her hand that leads toward it.”

“You had better not be insinuating what I think you are,” Braxiatel seethed.

“Why?” he challenged. “Because you may be forced to issue apology for what was obviously a hostile communication on your part toward an otherwise innocent woman caught up in the whirlwind created by another?”

“Because my mate would never initiate something so reckless…”

“Oh please,” Phiroi scoffed. “Romana is not, never has been, nor will she ever be a _follower_. Not even for you. She is a leader, a competent and authoritative one at that. I would think that the one who claims to know her to a depth like no other, you would know this.”

Braxiatel snorted angrily but said nothing.

“So if the ladies have gotten themselves involved in something that has you irate enough to tear down that precious, remarkable woman like you did, is very likely something of Romana’s creation, not Rose’s.”

Braxiatel turned toward Phiroi with such deliberate slowness that he almost creaked. “I don’t like what I’m hearing from you right now, Phiroi.”

“And I don’t much like what I hear from you,” he countered as his eyes shifted back to the fire. “Accept this warning: if I ever hear you speak of Rose in those terms again, then I will make sure that you rue the day you learned to speak in the first place.” He sniffed deeply. “Remember that I’m a physician specialising in what keeps Gallifreyans alive,” he flicked a glare toward him. “And what kills them…”

“Are you threatening me,” he snarled in reply. “Whilst expressing a very inappropriate fondness toward a mated woman.”

A voice from across the pit moaned out with annoyance. “Will the two of you shut up; or take your spat elsewhere? Some of us are trying to sleep.”

Both Braxiatel and Phiroi looked toward the long bundle of black and white across the fire pit. As their eyes focused across glowing embers into the darkness beyond, the identity of the man became somewhat clear. Narvin was on his back, his head propped up against a small moss-covered boulder, his hands were cradled together on his belly, and his straightened legs were crossed at the ankle. Not an entirely comfortable-looking position, but it seemed to work for him.

“Why aren’t you in a capsule?” Phiroi asked with flatness in his tone. 

Narvin’s eyes were closed. He tightened the cradle of his hands at his belly. “Far too much noise inside those machines. I was under the obviously misguided perception that sleeping beside the fire might grant me adequate solitude and silence to sleep.”

“You didn’t think to return to Gallifrey to sleep?” Braxiatel asked him with a light lift in his brow. 

Narvin held up his right arm. “Somewhere during the festivities I misplaced my Time Ring. Therefore, travel back to Gallifrey until I’ve located it is somewhat impossible.” He wriggled his shoulders. “I will look for it in the morning. Until then, shut up and let me sleep.”

“Well,” Braxiatel gruffed out with annoyance. “At least I now know how they managed to disappear without a capsule.” If he was any closer to Narvin, he would have kicked at his foot in annoyance. “How is it that the leader of the CIA was able to misplace a Time Ring? Isn’t it a rather important part of your position to make sure that the technology of our people doesn’t end up in the hands of those who should not possess said technologies?”

Narvin let out a gruff sigh of his own. Obviously, he wasn’t going to be left alone to continue to sleep. He propped up on his elbows, leaning to one side to rub the sleep from one of his eyes. “Right. Judging by your more testy than usual snipe, I’ll assume it’s been located.” He slowly levered himself up to a seat and leaned forward in a tired slouch. “Who got their hands on it, then; and what did they do with it?”

“Rose,” Braxiatel answered with a growl. 

“ _And_ Romana,” Phiroi added with a glare toward Braxiatel. “And considering Rose doesn’t know how to activate a Time Ring, nor what the device actually is, I think it’s very safe to assume that Romana was the one to utilise its power…”

“Actually,” Narvin said with a light sleepy hoarseness in his tone. “Rose and I have used the device. She’s aware of what it is, what it does…” he flicked his eyes up to Braxiatel who let out a somewhat victorious snort. His head shook slowly as he drew himself to a stand and brushed off the full length of his tunic. “However, Lord Phiroi is correct. She is not aware of how to activate it. We held each other as one when I used it for the two of us.”

Braxiatel watched as Narvin approached he and Phiroi with a roll in his shoulders and neck to work out the kinks of sleeping on the ground. “So, you’re saying you _cuddled_ my sister in law…”

“Prefer to call it a protective huddle against the vortex of travel,” he corrected with a tired look upward toward the much taller Braxiatel. “Nothing affectionate about it except to protect her from _un_ protected travel.”

“Well aren’t _you_ a gentleman?”

“Moreso than you at any rate,” he replied with a yawn against the back of his hand. “I heard you ranting at the poor woman. I’d have told you to go copulate with yourself as well had you spoken to _me_ that way.” He lifted his eyes and reconsidered that. “No. Actually. A staser shot would be a better go-to, I think.”

“From an undisclosed temporal location, Narvin?”

“Don’t think I’m not capable of it,” he warned with a shrug. He drew in a breath and folded his arms across his chest. “So, where did the pair of them end up?”

Braxiatel folded his arms across his chest and held the fold tightly. “I don’t know. Rose didn’t exactly disclose their location.”

“Not surprised,” Phiroi cut in. “Inviting someone furious at your actions to your location for further beratement isn’t quite Rose’s style. She’s smarter than that.”

“Are you indicating affection toward the mate of my brother?” Braxiatel snarled angrily.

“Her name is _Rose_ ,” Phiroi reminded him. “Not the _mate of your brother_. She is _Rose_ , do offer her that much respect, will you?”

“You have not answered my question.”

“Because it doesn’t warrant the dignity of an answer,” Phiroi snapped in reply. He looked toward Narvin. “In order for us to temper the storm rising within this increasingly mindless idiot, is there any way to track the flight path of your Time Ring, so that we can find the ladies?”

“You are treading a dangerous line, Phiroi,” Braxiatel warned him. His eyes narrowed to see the Time Lord physician counting off on his fingers. “What are you doing?”

“Counting the ways that I am able to drop you, right now, right where you stand based on my intimate working knowledge of Gallifreyan physiology.”

“Perfectly terrifying,” Braxiatel droned sardonically. “Sixteen, by the way.”

“Sixteen what?”

“There are sixteen available methods available to you to render me unconscious should you so desire.” He drew in a deep breath to stand tall. “But do take note that as I am aware of each and every one of them, I am more than capable of countering any attempt to do so.” He smiled facetiously. “So, go ahead if you dare.”

Narvin looked inquisitively between both men. Despite the hostile interaction between them both, he found it quite curious to note that Phiroi had adequately and very effectively calmed the violence of the storm to little more than an overcast sky. He found it quite remarkable that it had been so quickly achieved.

“So?” Phiroi pressed. “Is there any chance of tracing the path of the Time Ring to find the ladies?”

“No,” Narvin answered with a shake of his head. “It was designed for stealth, not to be traced or followed.” He exhaled. “And why it’s my preferred mode of travel between here and Gallifrey. I don’t wish for Estrail to be discovered, which will be an inevitability if I travel via Capsule.”

“So, in other words,” Braxiatel said with a low growl. “We have no way at all to know where they are, and how to help them if things go horribly wrong for them.” He pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’m calling her again. And so help me, if she doesn’t give me the answer I want…”

A quiet, yet authoritative voice spoke out from behind them. “That will be unnecessary, Lord President.”

The trio turned toward the darkness over their shoulders. In the shadows of the towering trees that lined the forests stood a tall young man in a field CIA uniform. In his hand he held a palm-sized device with a small digital display and a series of blinking red lights.

“I believe I know where they are.”

“Who are you?” Braxiatel asked with low warning in his voice. “And why did you call me that.”

“Because, in my timeline, that’s who you are,” he answered with a stride forward. He kept his eyes warily on Braxiatel and kept his distance. “Despite your protests otherwise, it’s a title you earned.”

Worry lengthened Braxiatel’s face. “But Romana…” his head shook. “I would never, not if she … She’s the true president.”

Narvin walked quickly between Phiroi and Braxiatel with a shove at both men. There was an angry look in his eyes as he stalked toward the man. “Are you one of mine?” he growled. “Crossing backward in time. Going against the laws set by Rassilon and our founders.”

The young man didn’t falter under the glare of Narvin. Instead he straightened his back and looked down the inch or so required to look into his eyes. “Indeed, Coordinator. I am one of your agents.” He drew in a deep breath. “And I am here under the orders of both yourself, and of the Lord President of the High Council.”

“For what reason would I allow this?” he snapped.

“Personal ones,” he answered along a straight and somewhat emotionless voice. “Reasons that are known only to four people on Gallifrey. You, Me, His Lord President, and the Lord Doctor.” He lifted his eyes to Braxiatel. “Originally here to stop _him_ from making a monumental and highly emotionally charged mistake that could destabilise the timelines.” He looked back to Narvin. “The one of him who stood to make that mistake, of course.”

“Not him, then?” Narvin asked with a light pinch in his eye and a gesture of a hand waved in Braxiatel’s direction.

The young man looked over Narvin’s shoulder and smiled just lightly. He looked back to his Boss and shook his head. “No. He’s following the timeline in the irrational and indignant manner he always has.” He looked back to Braxiatel. “And might I suggest you start to use that rather cunning mind of yours to come up with a way to ensure that you make reparations to Rose for the way you spoke to her. I can assure you that this is all Romana’s doing, not Rose’s.”

“Just who are you?” Braxiatel asked with a pinch in his eye.

“I am Jasondrurathusamia,” he answered with obvious pride to his name.

“Of which house?” he asked with definite suspicion.

“The one owned by my parents,” Jason answered cryptically. “The only thing that remains of the Great houses of Gallifrey are ash and ruin. Our Lady President opted not to reinstate, nor reseed any new houses of power when she rose to power after the civil uprising.”

“Sounds like a decision typical of Romana,” Narvin muttered under his breath. “Remove all the tradition of our peoples…”

“Remove the unnecessary pomp and circumstance, you mean,” Jason corrected him coolly. “And unite the people of Gallifrey to form a complete society of peoples working together for the betterment of Gallifrey.” His eyes glanced off the line of capsules. “If _this_ hasn’t swayed you toward understanding the faults within the Gallifrey of old, and how times and society had to change and evolve, Coordinator, then I doubt very much that anything ever will.”

“But has it?” he queried with a pinch in his brow. “Has my mind been changed?”

“I guess you’ll find out, won’t you?”

“You are very remarkably like her,” Narvin breathed out rather quietly; in a volume only loud enough for the two men to hear. 

“More her than him,” he answered with a light smile.

“Gods help me,” Narvin murmured with a light moan. “How did you convince either of them to let you join the CIA?”

“I didn’t. Got myself recruited while neither of them was watching, didn’t I?” he answered with a light smirk as he walked by him toward the two men standing at the edge of the firepit. 

“Clever,’ Narvin called after him with a smirk. “And very sneaky. Just the traits I look for in a recruit.”

“Yeah. Not really,” he answered with a sigh. “My cousin Jamie dared me to do it after a rather filthy night on Girgin after graduation from the Academy. I dared him to do the same. You ended up stuck with the both of us.”

“With protest, I will hope.”

“Plenty of it, I assure you.” Jason gave a bright smile and held his finger upward as the whine and wheeze of a relative dimensional stabiliser howled across reality. “Speak of the shifty Woprat, and he always shows up in some way or another.” He walked in a tight circle in search for the materialisation point. 

Braxiatel stopped Jason’s pacing with a heavy hand atop his shoulder. “You’re making me dizzy,” he remarked with a huff. “Do keep still.” The howling of the ship through reality was more prolonged than usual, and all four Time Lords began to look around curiously. “Just who is it we’re waiting for?”

“My cousin and fellow Agent,” Jason answered with a light smile. “Jamesthinducapiro.”

“Someone who can’t pilot a capsule?” he queried. “It’s taking an awful long time to break out of the vortex.”

“Actually, he’s one of the best capsule pilots on Gallifrey,” Jason answered. “He’s been on assignment across dimensional walls. Never easy to pilot between walls without sustaining a navigational glitch or two.” He let out a long hiss through gritted teeth as a cylinder started to materialise atop the glowing coals in the firepit. He cupped his hands around his mouth as the ship completed its materialisation. “Abort the materialisation, Jamie. Abort!”

The doors to the cylinder creaked open, releasing a hiss of steam from the interior. A youthful, roguish face with a thick chestnut hair spiked upward in an artful mess popped out. Wide brown eyes filled with searching curiosity looked briefly around the scene and then fell onto Jason. Wide eyes shifted into happy recognition and a smile stretched wide on his face. “Ha! Found you!” He curled around the door completely and kicked out a leg to stride forward.

“Jamie!” Jason called with panic. “Look out, you’re in the middle of a firepit.”

Jamie looked downward and seemed pretty nonplussed about it. He shrugged as he slid his hands into the pockets of his black CIA trousers and stepped down confidently in the middle of the coals. “No big deal,” he sang out with a smile. “My fine lady has my feet ….” He stopped mid-stride to reconsider that. “No. That’s not right. I mean back. She has my back. _And_ my feet, I suppose.”

Below his feet, extending from the doors of his capsule, a black pathway formed through the coals to lead him onto the safety of the ground at the very edge of the pit. He stepped onto the grass and looked back to his capsule with thanks. “Might want to resettle somewhere a little less sparky with intense heat and nastiness.” He turned to his cousin with a wink in his eye. “Like the new upgrade I installed on the old girl? Doesn’t matter where we materialise, I’m not going to get wet, muddy, melted, or incinerated boots ever again. My sweetheart can now extend a protective plasma forcefield ramp or platform a full thirty feet from her doors.”

“Nice,” Jason purred out with awe as he stepped forward to pull his cousin into an embrace of greeting. He pulled out of the hug, but kept one arm across his shoulder as the two men looked toward the ship. “Is that the big project that you and your dad were working on?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Prototyped it on my capsule rather than his. See how it goes, then he’ll send the design to the dry docks for install on capsules going forward.”

“Brilliant.”

He ran his hand through his hair and held at the back of his head in a stretch as the capsule noisily rematerialized in a new location mere feet away from her original landing point. “That was a tough trek through the wall,” he admitted with a wince as he stepped out from underneath his cousin’s arm and walked toward the trio of silent and curious Time Lords at the edge of the firepit. “Took three hours of fighting those controls to get her through it. _Three_ hours, Jase.”

“Should we be taking my capsule, then?” Jason offered. “I know the two of you don’t get along, but she should behave herself if I ask her really nicely.”

“Nah,” he drawled with a smirk. “Got the cords and assignment protocols already uploaded in mine. She’s working through the flight data now looking for the best materialisation point. Give her a few minutes and she’ll be ready to go.”

“What about you?” Jason asked with genuine concern.

“Oh, bring it on,” he said through a toothy grin. “I’m ready.”

“You have to be exhausted.”

“After a transdimensional flight, a quick trip through the time vortex will be a relaxing breeze,” he said with a shrug. “I can sleep when we’re done. Well. More like crash into complete unconsciousness. Stretching the cycle a bit, can’t lie about that, but we are on a bit of a time crunch here.” He looked toward Braxiatel. “Particularly if he doesn’t put away the phone and shorten our time frame further.”

“If I have him promise to put away the phone, then we can hover in the vortex for a few to let you catch up on your sleep, and materialise on time.” He held up his hand when his cousin looked to argue. “You are a nightmare when you lack sleep, Jamie. I don’t need you all giddy and unreasonable on this one.”

He dipped backward with a single laugh, then leaned forward with a continued laugh. “Oh, don’t you start going all older and wiser cousin on me, Jase. I’ve got two and a half minutes on you, remember. I’m the _elder_ of the two of us.” 

“Two and a half minutes maybe, but actual maturity level is sometimes in question.”

Jamie wore a wide smile that almost audibly clicked into place with a suck of air in through his teeth. He approached Narvin, held out his hand in greeting, then opted against that to offer a salute instead. “Boss. Agent Jamesthinducapiro reporting for assignment after a successful recovery of the Transtemporal Dimensional Wave Shifter device from the Vukan Erkit province of …”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jason moaned. “Stop showing off. This Narvin doesn’t care. He’s not our boss, yet.”

“I beg to differ,” Narvin countered with a low growl in the back of his throat. “I am as much your coordinator now as I am inside your own timestream.” He exhaled and looked toward the young man and his toothy grin of self pride. “Well, there’s no questioning your paternity, is there?”

“Nope,” he said with a wink in his eye. “Chip off the old block, or so I’m told. Though not often said in a complimentary way when it comes from you, I will admit.” He looked toward Braxiatel. “Hey Tonza Brax. Still mad at my mother, or are you calming yourself down a little?” He blew out a breath. “Damn, are you in for it when she gets back. It serves as legend within the family how hard she came down on you.”

Jason moaned. “You know, Jamie. I was really trying not to reveal who either of us were to him. Timelines, you know? Best he doesn’t know his future…”

“Two problems I can see with that,” Jamie countered with one hand inside his trouser pocket and the other lifted in the air to indicate his count. “One. He’s been flitting through his own timeline since he left the academy. He probably knows more about his own future than his future selves know about their past. And two…” He turned and opened his arms in presentation of himself. “Look at me, Jase. Come on. Pretty obvious, yeah?”

“It’s dark,” Jason countered with clear incredulity. “You could have hidden in the shadows or something. By the Gods, Jamie. You’re a CIA agent.”

“But not a stealthy spy type agent,” he drawled in a moan. “Failed that exam on the first day of training when I we showed up hungover and I threw up on Narvin’s boots, didn’t I?” He flicked a dismissive wave at him. “And anyway. Invisibility _really_ isn’t my thing … it’s _yours_ , won’t deny you that one, but not me.”

“Both of you,” Braxiatel finally boomed out with impatience. “Will you cease this infernal natter?” He waited until both sets of eyes shifted toward him. “And tell me just what it is that has brought the two of you here, out of your own time, and into a timeline that you should not be in.”

Both lads looked at Braxiatel with wide eyes and lightly gaped jaws. They pointed toward each other rather than simply answer the question.

“Well?” He growled with a fold of his arms across his chest. “I’m waiting.”

“Tonza Thete brought me here,” Jason answered after a moment. “That is to say he had me materialise here at the request of my father…” He looked over his shoulder to indicate the Braxiatel from the future who was parked a fair distance away from the actual encampment. “Father assigned me with a task approved by both the Presidential Office and the Celestial Intervention Agency.”

Jamie thumbed toward Jason. “And I’m here because Jase requested my assistance. We are typically assigned together when the task requires a pair of agents who actually have a brain inside their heads.”

“Which right now is most certainly in question,” Braxiatel countered. “And what assignment have you been given?”

“To stop your younger self from destroying the timelines,” Jason answered ignoring the light sound of surprise from his cousin at his side. “Because if you aren’t stopped, Father. Then _all_ of reality is at risk.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	51. Truths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Romana and Braxiatel share some truths with Rose....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand, we're back in Brax's office... Warning for Brax/Romana sappy mushy stuff toward the end.
> 
> Just remember: Everything I do has a purpose ... including what's in the chapter.
> 
> I really hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Rose looked down at her hand, which was now tenderly held within Romana’s incredibly soft palms. Worried about just what it might be that Romana was about to break to her – and the potential list of bad news items now filling her mind absolutely terrified her – Rose decided to focus somewhat on the softness of Romana’s hands, and just what moisturiser she had to be using to keep them that way. It was like she’d immersed her hand into a cool cloud of gentle fluffiness … No, not fluffy. Romana’s hands weren’t fluffy. A cloud of the softest silk. No wonder Brax shuddered whenever Romana touched her hand to his, stroked his jaw, or drew it down along his cheek. She was close to doing the same…

“Rose?” Romana pressed softly. “Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”

“No, I don’t believe that she is,” Braxiatel remarked from his side of the desk. “Your friend seems otherwise occupied.”

Romana let out a long sigh. “Quite likely her argument with the elder version of you,” she guessed softly. “Neither of you handle it well when you argue and leave it in the air like this.”

Braxiatel hummed out thoughtfully. “Well. That is very _interesting_ , I must say.” He looked toward his future wife with his eyes glistening with curiosity. “You suggest that in my future I explore an actual _friendship_ with another.” His eyes flicked back to Rose. “With my brother’s _mate_ of all people.” He hummed again. “Well, that would indicate that I spend time within my brother’s presence in our future, which I have to admit is a potential that I struggle to reconcile in my mind. Since his graduation, we rarely spend any longer than five minutes within the same timeline, let alone in each other’s company.”

“Circumstances change,” Romana offered with a light smile. “And for a moment, he stops running.”

“The possibility of that is slim,” Braxiatel said with a long sigh. “It’s his instinct to do so, which leads me to believe that all of you…” he swept his hand across the table to somewhat politely gesture toward the three ladies. “You’re from an alternate universe rather than this one.” He exhaled hard. “How utterly devastating _that_ is to learn.”

“We aren’t from an alternate reality,” Rose offered quietly. She looked toward him with a slow blink of her eyes. “Didn’t really know they existed.”

“They do,” he answered with a slow nod of his head. “They most certainly do.” He looked to Romana. “However, if you had crossed dimensional walls, it wouldn’t be something you wouldn’t have noticed. Now, my dear. You had something that you wished to share with Rose?”

Rose sucked in her breath and looked toward Romana with worry and expectation in her eyes. She tightened her hand around one of Romana’s. “What do you need to tell me?”

Romana nodded slowly at bit at her lip and as she considered the most appropriate starting point of discussion.

“Is it bad?” Rose asked timidly with a dip of her head to capture Romana’s eyes.

“That all depends,” she answered softly. “I don’t think so. In fact, I think it’s remarkable, and I truly believe the Doctor will think so, as well.”

“Okay?”

Romana lifted her head. She looked to the man who would become her husband as though looking for strength from him to continue. At the nod of his head, she looked toward her sister in law. “Do you recall when you were ambushed after your school run; when you were shot?”

Rose nodded slowly. “When our future husbands rescued me and took me to Gallifrey?”

She stroked her hands on the slightly shaking hand that was held within them. “Well. The prognosis was grim. There was no way that the Doctor could save you, despite his very best efforts to do so.”

Rose chuckled somewhat worriedly. “Yes, well, obviously he was able to. I’m here, right? Not dead.”

Romana looked again to Braxiatel as though wanting him to pick up and continue. He tilted his head to her. “I am afraid I can’t help you with this explanation, Romana,” he said curiously. “I am as in the dark to the events as Rose appears to be – despite being slightly aware of the final outcome of it.”

Rose looked to him. “What outcome is that?”

He shifted his gaze to hers. The lack of the warmth she would typically expect from him hitched in her breath. He didn’t acknowledge her obvious start at his gaze; instead he hit straight to the core of the issue. “That a woman born human is now emitting the telepathic signature of a Gallifreyan-born Time Lord… or Lady as in your particular case.”

“Oh don’t be daft,” Rose huffed out with a forced roll of her eyes. “Brax, you’ve been in my head enough times now, that I’m probably just projecting whatever signature you’ve put in there. Or, like Romana said earlier, as I’m bonded to the Doctor, I’m sending out his signal, or whatever it is.”

“It doesn’t work quite like that,” he reminded her. “And if I’m being perfectly honest with you, young lady, this bond you have with my brother sings so low that one could be forgiven for thinking that you aren’t bonded at all.”

“I’m sorry?” she breathed on a whisper of shock.

“Oh, you are betrothed,” he said with a shrug. “That much I can feel. A … _one sided thing_ , likely from my brother’s end, but a full soul bond?” He shook his head. “No. It doesn’t exist within you.”

“Yeah, well tell that to the bond guard attacks I get whenever anyone who isn’t the Doctor decides to plant one on me.”

A brow flicked up high. “Oh? Kiss a lot of people outside your marriage, do you?”

“Mostly _you_ ,” she answered with an upward roll of her head to look at the ceiling of his office. There was a roll inside her free wrist. “For varying reasons of necessity that I don’t always quite understand.”

“Such as?”

“Well starting your heart when it stopped for one,” she said with a shrug. “Not that _that_ went down all that well. Save your life then get yelled at for the effort.”

Braxiatel looked to Romana with a somewhat perplexed expression. “I don’t know that I want to ask.”

“Probably best you don’t,” she said with a sigh.

He looked back to Rose. “So, if I understand you correctly and accept your assurance that you have a full soul bond in place, if I were to kiss you now, what would happen?”

“One,” she began. “You won’t be kissing me, because in case you didn’t realise it, I’m pretty pissed off with you right now, so you’d get thumped if you even puckered your lips in my direction…”

“You’re upset at my future self,” he corrected her flatly. “Not me. But do go on.”

“If you did happen to get one on me, Brax, then I’d end up on the floor with a massive headache and stomach cramps.” She exhaled hard. “Sometimes it’s so bad, I pass out and then don’t even remember doing it.”

He pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “While, yes, that is the general side effect of attempted infidelity against a bonded Gallifreyan…”

“I’m human,” she reminded him. 

“No, dear, you aren’t,” he corrected her firmly. “At least not anymore.” He flicked up a finger of warning when she looked to argue him. “When I am _finished_ , if you don’t mind.” He pressed his hands into the desktop to push himself up to a stand. “What you describe is, indeed, an activation of the bond guard. And while I have no doubt that you once held a bond with your husband that was great enough that a guard would be formed between you both. I do believe that I can prove to you that no such bond exists now.”

“Don’t be daft,” she growled at him with cautious eyes as he moved around the desk. “It’s unbreakable.”

“Not entirely true; and if what I believe occurred on Gallifrey when my brother had to save your singular life truly did occur, then he ended up doing something that severed the bond between the pair of you.” He frowned. “And he’d have to have known. He’s a Prydonian telepathic master, so he has no excuse against having that knowledge. Any cadet that took telepathy one-oh-one at the Academy will know that the use of the Chameleon Arch to change the species of a Time Lord _will_ erase and sever any telepathic bonds – familial or marriage - until such time that they revert back to their original species.” He looked toward Romana; whose eyes widened with realisation. “It’s the protective nature of the Arch to remove any bonds to keep that Time Lord or Lady hidden as much as possible. The entire purpose of the filthy contraption is for that individual to completely disappear.”

Romana released one of her hands from Rose’s to cover at her mouth to hide a gasp. “Surely the both of you would have considered that when you used the Arch,” she said through her fingers. She flicked her eyes to his. “Surely, that is something you would have considered at the time, Brax. I certainly figured the Doctor would have reasserted their bond the moment she woke up, so it never occurred to me to double-check.”

“Well it’s quite obvious that there was very little actual _thinking_ happening at the time,” Braxiatel muttered gruffly.

“Or I didn’t give him the chance,” Rose said quietly. There was a wince on her face to suggest that she was trying very hard to digest information that she didn’t understand at all. 

“What do you mean?” Braxiatel asked with a fold of his arms against his chest and a lean of his hip against his desk.

“When I woke up, I took off,” she admitted. She looked to Romana. “I thought I’d been taken by Rassilon. I—”

“Taken by whom?” Braxiatel barked out worriedly. “Did you say _Rassilon_?” His eyes shot toward Romana and he wore an expression of surprise and even wonder. “Surely she’s not referring to his Lord President; the Lord of whom has an entire exhibit here in my collection?”

“Less awe, more disgust,” Rose gruffed out. “And _she’s_ right here, yeah?”

He shot a look of shock toward her. “His Lord Rassilon is a legend among our people,” he said on a low voice. 

“You change your mind,” Rose said quietly. She looked toward Romana. “So, anyway. When I woke up, I ran. I bumped into Narvin, and pretty quickly, was taken back to my own timeline. Barely had any time with the Doctor _or_ Brax, really.”

“Then we can safely assume that it wasn’t quite at the forefront of their minds if you were on the run,” Braxiatel said with only a light huff in his tone.

“But you’re wrong,” Rose challenged him. She petted the space between her breasts. “Because he’s here. The Doctor. He’s in here, and he’s here.” She tapped at her temple. “I can feel him.”

“Phantom connection,” he offered. “Understandable.”

“You’re wrong.”

He held his hand out to her. “Come here, and I’ll prove it to you.”

Her eyes widened with question and worry. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I’ll prove to you.” He wriggled his fingers. “I am unbound…” He looked toward Romana with a smile. “For now.” His eyes flicked back to Rose. “So, I won’t suffer any duress.”

“Oh, you’re not proving anything to me,” she said with a growl and a narrowing of her eyes. “I’d rather make out with Romana.”

“Oh!” Romana peeped uncomfortably at her side. “Well.”

“Or hell,” Rose continued. “Even your friend Bernice out there. But I am not snogging you. No way. Not happening.”

Braxiatel tilted his head curiously at her. There was a hint of a smile on his face and a light pinch of scrutiny in his eye. “I can’t help but remark that you appear to be much more upset over the minor inconvenience of losing an easily reasserted bond than you are about having your species forcibly and unknowingly changed while you were, _well_ , sleeping, I suppose you could say.”

“Probably because I’m still trying to wrap my head around _that_ bit,” Rose countered with a weakening voice. “Trying to understand how it’s even possible for him to do that.”

Romana looked at her with an expression of question that was somewhat condescending, but without being insulting. “Are we not here because our future selves have done the same to themselves?” She held up her hand to Braxiatel without looking at him when he made a sound of surprise. “In a minute, Brax.” She drew in a breath. “And, Rose, did you not see the Doctor change himself into a human on Earth in the late twentieth century? Where were you, Australia?”

“Yeah, but,” Rose floundered with a flap of her lips and a crease in her brow. “But that’s him, nothing the Doctor does can surprise me anymore. But me, Romana? I’m. I’m just a …”

“Just a _nothing_ ,” Romana corrected her firmly. “You know how much Brax and I hate it when you refer to yourself in that manner.”

She looked at her with an expression of saddened confusion. “But Romana. You guys. You, Brax, the Doctor, Phiroi, even Narvin, you’re all Time Lords. Amazing, brilliant. Can do anything.” She looked down at herself. “Me?”

“Are better,” Romana said reassuringly. “Can do better.”

“Well not anymore,” she said with rising emotion shuddering her voice. “I’m one of you guys now, yeah? Is that what you’re saying?” She touched at her own face. “Can change my face and my body. Regenerate.”

“A matching lifespan to the Doctor,” Romana added with a smile. “Rose. It’s wonderful…”

Rose shook her head. “No, Romana. It’s not wonderful.” She drew in deep breaths with such intensity that she rocked backward and forward with each inhale and exhale. “It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying, and it’s … it’s just terrifying.” She shot a look toward Romana. “Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t the Doctor say anything to me.”

“Oh, err…”

“And I don’t mean the future one,” Rose clarified. “I mean my Doctor. _My_ Doctor in _my_ timeline. Why did he keep this from me?”

“Because he doesn’t know,” she replied with a crease in her brow. “Only Lord Phiroi and I know about it. Braxiatel, the future of him, he said you didn’t know, that the Doctor didn’t know until you regenerated for the first time.” She tried to take Rose’s hand and flinched her hands back toward her own chest when Rose jerked her hands away. “Please understand, Rose. We had to maintain the timelines.”

“Timelines that apparently don’t matter _now_ ,” she charged in reply. “Now that you’ve told me about it _before_ I go all flame thrower and change.” Her eyes hardened and she looked dead ahead of her. “Or do the both of you force me to forget about it? Get into my mind and make me forget?”

Romana breathed out her name in pleading.

“Don’t,” Rose huffed out with a lift of her hand toward her. “Don’t tell me that you’d never do anything like that. Especially not when Leela’s sitting beside me in the state _he_ put her in.” her eyes flashed angrily toward an otherwise non-affected Braxiatel. “I don’t trust you at all.”

“Probably a very good idea that you don’t,” he agreed.

“Braxiatel!” Romana called with chiding.

“No, no, Romana,” Rose said quietly as she pushed herself to a stand. “This isn’t _my_ Brax. We don’t have the history that me and Brax do. He’s right to tell me not to trust him, because I shouldn’t.”

“Sit down, please,” Romana urged without her typical firmness to her voice. 

Rose shook her head. “I can’t. I think I need to walk for a while.”

“Then let me join you.”

Rose shook her head. “I need to walk alone. Away from Time Lords, and away from … God … away from all of the secrets.” She sniffed in hard. “I’ll wander around the collection…”

“There are as many secrets among the artifacts and paintings in the collection than there are across the entire universe,” Braxiatel said with a sly smile. “I’m afraid trying to get away from secrets won’t be as easy as you think.”

She gave him a flat and tired look. “Then I’ll walk outside. Your gardens are breathtaking, it would be a shame not to sit and appreciate them a while.” She exhaled and stepped around Leela to walk to the door. “While I contemplate this whole new completely mental part of my … well. _New_ life, I suppose.”

“Thank you,” he said with a tip of his head. “My staff work very hard on them.”

“I’m sure they do.” She replied softly as she left the office, softly closing the door behind her.

“I don’t want her going alone,” Romana warned on a low voice. “Brax, tell me you have some way to keep an eye on her.”

“She’s safe here,” he assured her firmly. “There is no trouble that she can get into.”

“In four hundred years from now, when you meet Rose and take her into your hearts, you will look back on that assurance and slap your own face.”

“That’s an image,” he said with a lift in his brows. 

“In time, you will see.”

He exhaled a breath and walked to the doorway. He opened the door wide and widened his lips into a grin. “Bernice,” he called happily. “Oh, there you are. I do apologise for the wait. Are your needs being appropriately met?”

Benny was seated in a plush looking armchair across from his office that was well within sight of Diana’s desk. She’d made considerable effort to sit up in a facetiously straight and delicately cross-legged manner of victory against the PA while she waited for her coffee to be prepared to just her liking (three of them had already been sent back). At Braxiatel’s voice, she let her slouch fall in place and slowly looked up from the pages of a tabloid gossip magazine she’d knicked from the desk of one of the secretaries. “Mostly,” she answered with a drop of her eyes back to the magazine and a page full of faces that she sorely wanted to draw moustaches and blackened teeth on. Pirates. Some of them needed to become pirates…

“Well that is very good to hear,” he called out. “I do look to be a little while longer with her Madam President, and so in the meantime I wonder if you could do me a little favour. Just a teeny tiny one. Nothing that will take up too much of your time.”

She didn’t look up as she flicked to the next page of the magazine. “No.”

“I’m asking very nicely,” he offered. “In my most pleasant voice.”

“Not quite as pleasant as you think it is,” she replied as she flicked to another page and still without looking up at him. “The answer is _no_. I won’t do you any favours.”

“There is a bottle of Draconian Brandy in it if you do,” he offered with a smirk.

“Still no.” Her flick to another page was bringing her far too close to the very end of the magazine. Soon she would have no more pages to flick angrily at him. Though the offer of Draconian Brandy was close to far too difficult to decline, if she could make him sweeten it just a little bit more…

“Okay,” he said after a moment. “Two. I can procure you a pair of Draconian Brandy bottles. Vintage.”

“How vintage?”

“Six hundred years at least,” he teased. “Direct from my father’s cellar.”

She held back the widening of excitement in her eyes, thankful that she was still looking down at the glossy image of a near-naked, furry blue celebrity from the planet Fiphearn frolicking on a beach.

Maybe not _that_ thankful…

“I want the dig at Irqruks,” she said smoothly with a flick to another page. “And not part of another party, Braxiatel. I want _full_ access, and _full_ control over the site.” She finally lifted her eyes. “You took Sarah and Cassandra off my team. I want them back – _permanently_.”

“The two of them are required elsewhere,” he argued just lightly. “Their knowledge of the ancient Hulnaid empire makes them more appropriate to join…”

“I want them back. No arguments,” she ordered with a tilt of challenge in her head. “Two bottles of vintage Draconian Brandy, full control over the dig at Irqruks, and Sarah and Cassandra back on my team.”

He noisily sucked in a deep breath and held it a moment behind lips pressed tightly together. After a moment he let out his breath and lightly dipped his head in acquiescence. “Your wish is my command,” he said to her. “It will be done. I’ll have Sarah and Cassandra returned on the next transport out of Hulnaid.”

She stood up quickly, a smirk of victory lifting up one side of her mouth. “Right. So what do you need me to do for you?”

“That young lady, the blonde one who was with President Romana.”

Benny looked toward the doors. “Yes?”

“I need you to keep an eye on her for me, if you don’t mind.”

“Well, I _do_ ,” she confirmed quickly. “I’m no one’s baby sitter, least of all a member of the royal party of Gallifrey.” 

“Presidential,” he corrected.

“I know,” she drawled. “I was being facetious.”

“Don’t, please, it doesn’t suit either of us.” He looked to the door. “As a member of the Presidential envoy, Rose is to receive protection from the hosting party.” 

She waved her hand at him. “Yes. Well, I am far too busy for that. I’m not a body guard, a baby sitter, a police officer. I’m an archaeologist.”

“Then perhaps I’ll offer the Brandy to Diana instead,” he murmured with a rub at his jaw and a look toward Diana’s desk. “I am quite sure she will be eager to assign someone to watch her.”

“Fine,” she snapped. “Fine. I’ll do it.” She folded the magazine into two as she rose to a stand, then discarded it onto the chair with a flick of her wrist. “I won’t deny that I find her a little curious. It might be interesting to find out just how a human managed to marry herself a Time Lord. And more curiously, _which_ one she married. Has to be high up in their society to have playdates and day trips with her highness.”

“I believe you know him,” Braxiatel offered with a sly smirk. He waited for her to look at him. “Rose is married to the Doctor.”

Her sly smile fell just briefly, then stretched wide across her face as a chuckle shook her shoulders. “Really? Well. Do excuse me, Brax. Got some babysitting to do.”

Braxiatel shook his head as he leaned back into his office and closed the door behind him. He had one hand inside his trouser pocket and the other dragged lightly across his table top as he walked around his desk to take a seat.

“Bernice will keep an eye on Rose,” he assured Romana as he took a slow seat. “Now if you really wouldn’t mind. Can you please explain to me just who you’re looking for, and what you meant when you told Rose that your future selves were Chameleon Arched.” He watched her draw in a breath. “I will assume they are who you’re seeking?”

“They are,” she confirmed. Her breath drew in an apologetic sigh. “And I’m afraid that I really can’t tell you that much more than the fact I believe them both to be female.”

“Don’t let it be said that you don’t like to issue a decent challenge,” he said with a light laugh. “But we’ve worked with less, Romana.” He extended his arm across the table and took her hand in his. He watched their connection as he threaded his fingers in between each of hers then slowly curled them down to hold her hand firmly. “And I believe that as long as we work together, we will be successful, as we always were.”

“And always will be,” she assured him with a squeeze at his hand. “My hearts beat for you, Irving. They beat for the one I’m with now, for the one I’m with in my future, and for the man you are right now.” She drew his hand to her lips and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. “For as long as my hearts beat, they will belong in your hands.”

He stood up quickly and moved around the table. His eyes were locked on hers, and he wasn’t at all surprised to see her on her feet in the short moment it took him to shift by Leela to be upon his future wife. Her hands were cupped around his jaw to pull him toward her before he had the moment to set his hands on her hips. Her lips found his in a fierce claim that near suffocated her sharp and wanton cry when he pulled her up against him, then turned them both to seat her on the edge of his desk. He pulled back from her with a gasp and panted hard when her ankles locked together behind his thighs to pull him in tightly against her. He braced a hand on the desk top and held her lower back inside the other.

“I don’t do this,” he panted quietly against her bottom lip as her mouth sought out his. “Although only Rassilon knows why…”

“You do in your future,” she coaxed him gently with deliberate soft gasps against his lips. “In _our_ future.”

“Romana… I can’t. Not in the way you clearly want me to. I'm sorry.”

His voice was a warning for her to stop him. He was close to breaking his own taboo. Romana wouldn’t have that; wouldn’t force him to succumb to her like that when he clearly wasn't ready, and certainly not before their time. She walked the pads of her fingers up into his hairline, touching lightly at his temples. “But, is this okay?” She queried softly. “Love inside our minds?”

His arms snapped tightly around her; the offer too great to turn down. “Gods yes,” he hissed through his teeth. “Contact.”

“Contact,” she sighed out when his nose dropped down into her bosom and he let out a long moan at her mind moving and swirling inside his. He had been so starved for telepathic contact of any kind for more than a decade, so to finally feel connection – and more blissfully, connection from _her_ – Braxiatel barely remained upright.

Gods, he didn’t know if he could find the strength to let her go now. Not now that he’d let her so deeply inside his mind. He'd missed her so much, there was no way he could ever walk away from her again.


	52. Benny and Rose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Benny and Rose finally meet properly...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um. Yeah. Hope I got Benny right in this chapter.... she is one that I am honestly timid to have to write... Such a fan fav..
> 
> Anyhoo ... I have to run really fast...
> 
> I really hope you enjoy. Till Monday, have a great weekend!!

~~oooOOOOooo~~

The howl and whine of a somewhat exhausted travel capsule sounded out across the carpark. Hot winds shifted quickly across the equally sunburned and sizzling tarmac, picking up pieces of discarded paper waste and lawn clippings to whip the around in a quick columnar circular motion.

A grey and black hover sedan with its back seat filled with a foursome of grey-skinned and white haired children all hollering and screaming and ignoring their harried mother who was turned in her seat to yell orders backward for them all to shut up.

“Forty minutes,” the driver said with a deep growl of frustration through a straight set of crystal-blue teeth. “The largest parking pad in the galaxy, and I still can’t find a decent parking space.”

“Find one,” the mother growled. “Because I’ll be forced to kill the lot of them if we don’t get them out of this vehicle within the next five minutes.”

“There’s a ray gun in the glove box,” he seethed. “You’ll need to switch it from stun to lethal.”

She gasped and pointed to a space beside a tall cylindrical column that glistened luminously in the bright sunlight overhead. “There! Next to the Gallifreyan ship. There’s a skimmer pulling out. Get that space, Freron, whatever you do, get that space.”

“On it, beloved,” he muttered as he pulled beside the exiting vehicle in wait for it to vacate so he could pull in. He leaned out his window at the kicking breeze and the sound of howling and wheezing that seemed to be calling in from all around them. “What in Drypraxia is that?” he asked.

His wife looked across him rather than outside her own window, which drew a growl of frustration from him. She ignored the growl. “I really don’t know. Has the Collection got a new exhibit we don’t know about?”

“Unlikely that it’s exhibit related,” Freron said with a huff. “Sound like that coming from the Collection would deafen anyone in there. Now will you get off me, please?”

She rolled her eyes and sat back in her seat. She looked toward the space, now vacant from the skimmer vehicle. “Finally,” she sang out.

Freron shifted his vehicle forward with a breath of relief of his own. He let out a yelp and slammed on the breaks as the space filed with light and a slowly materialising ship. “Oh no you don’t!” he growled with a slap of both hands on his steering wheel. “This is my space!”

“What’s wrong?” his wife questioned as she caught her breath from her sudden pitch forward at the hard brake of the vehicle. “Why’d you stop like that?”

A swear in his native tongue that he refused to apologise to his children for using sailed angrily though purple lips. “Those damn selfish, self righteous Gallifreyans!”

“What?”

“Give me a moment,” he growled as he undid his seatbelt. “I need to kick a Time Lord knacker…”

“Don’t get into a fight, least of all with a Time Lord, dear.”

“I don’t fear a Lord of Time. Pathetic creatures that they are. It was _my_ space,” he declared. “And they’re not getting it!”

She huffed and covered her forehead in her hand as her husband climbed out of the vehicle. She could already tell this was going to be a very, very long day.

Less than a moment after the ship completed her materialisation, the doors to the opened. Jason stepped out of the capsule first and he looked back inside the console room toward his cousin rather than outside the craft. “Might be good for you to put her in self repair mode while we’re here,” he called to his cousin still performing his shutdown procedures. “Her Helmic Regulator sounds a bit off.”

“Yeah,” he drawled. “Absolute Tesseractulator is playing up as well. Probably need a couple of hours at least for her to properly calibrate if that’s the case.”

“Told you we should’ve taken my capsule,” he said with a sigh. “This one’s exhausted.”

“She’s okay, aren’t you darling,” he cooed with a stroke of the rotor column. “And you don’t like it when I travel without you, do you?”

“Yeah,” Jason breathed out with a shake of his head. “I’ll leave you two alone for a bit, then…” He hiccupped as he collided with a grey and white being that stood angrily in front of him. “Might want to watch where you’re walking, my good man.”

“Oh, don’t you start with that pompous Time Lord drivel,” he growled in reply with a point toward the ship. “This is my space. I was here first. Move your ship.”

Jason folded his arms across his chest and looked down at the creature. He stood only chest height to Jason but had all of the confidence in aggression of a man twice his size. “ _Your_ spot?” he drawled out. “No chance of you being here before us considering we began materialisation, oh,” he lifted one side of his cheek. “About three centuries before you were even hatched.”

“Oh, don’t you get smart with me,” he snarled. “I’ll lodge a complaint the owner. Call the authorities and have them impound your capsule.” He pushed up his sleeves. “Right after I give you a right thumping for theft of my space.”

Jason’s expression didn’t quite shift away from tired annoyance as he unfolded his arms and lowered one hand to his trouser pocket. “One,” he began with a light lift of his eyes toward the building that shone in the distance as he leaned to pull something from his pocket. “I am one of the owners of this collection, so consider your complaint received, noted, stamped, discussed, and ultimately rejected. Two..” He opened a small leather folder. “I _am_ the authority.”

Freron narrowed his eyes as he looked at the identification noted in the fold. Those eyes widened with horror. “CIA?” His eyes shot up to Jason’s flatly unexpressive gaze. “You. You’re…”

A smirk appeared on Jason’s face. “Do I need to perform a quick search of your vehicle plates?”

He held up both hands and quickly stepped backward. “No. No. No need for that. No reason at all.” He jogged back to his vehicle. “Spot’s all yours. Sorry for the bother.”

“Yeah, okay.” He watched with a legitimate smirk as the man climbed back aboard his vehicle and quickly tore off down along the aisle in escape. 

Jamie appeared behind him, a beaming grin on his face as he clicked the door closed behind him. “Did I miss something, Jase? You’ve got that expression of self-righteous victory on your face.”

Jason shrugged and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets. “Nah. Just a Dypraxian degenerate getting upset that you took his parking spot.”

“Oh?” Jamie sang out apologetically with a lift in both brows. “I can move her if I need to.”

“Nah,” he answered with a shrug. “We had a _polite_ discussion about it, and he decided to graciously let us have it.”

Jamie rolled his eyes and let out a moan. “You pulled rank, didn’t you?”

“No sense in having it if I don’t use it,” he muttered. “Now come on. Best we get a move on.” He looked upward into the sky. “Almost midday. If we don’t want to end up skulking about in the dark, we have to find our target as quickly as possible.”

Jamie followed behind his cousin, his hands deep inside his trouser pockets and a light slouch in his shoulders. He looked around the expanse of bitumen and vehicles that surrounded them. “So…” he breathed out finally when Jason pulled out his small palm-held device and used his fingertip to swipe up and at information on it. “I thought we were here to stop your dad from being a monumental boob?”

“Yeah, you say that like it isn’t quite his default setting,” Jason answered with a light chuckle. “Nah. Just used that as a means to keep his nose out of what we’re _really_ here for.” He exhaled hard. “Don’t need him sniffing about and getting in our way because he’s in a snit with your mum and needs to somehow expel that hostility on the nearest closely matching bio-receptacle.”

‘You lied to your father?” he balked out with false shock. “Oh, what new levels will you stoop to, Jase?”

“Oh, shut up,” he shot back with a light laugh. “It’s not like you don’t routinely tell a fib or fifty to your own father when you want to sneak about.” He held up his device and walked in a forward full circle turn. “How you seem to always get away with it, I’ll never fathom. I can rarely get one by my dad.”

Jamie kicked at a small stone of the tarmac and let his shoulders lift and fall with his own amusement. “Helps when you have a sister willing to back you up. Aly’s got it down to a science.” He lifted a cheeky grin to his cousin. “Really, you should enlist her help from time to time. She’d got your old man wrapped around her little finger.”

“Seems to be a female trait amongst your group,” he answered with a light sigh. “Father can’t resist the wants and desires of any of them.” He sighed and lifted his eyes from the device. “Especially since … well. You know.”

“He’s ready to call it you know,” Jamie offered quietly. “Admit the truth of it.”

“Yeah,” Jason agreed softly. “I know. And after ten years, what other option is there? You and me, we came to terms with it five years ago. Accepted they were gone. Moved on. Grieved.”

“Dad won’t,” Jamie said with a sad sigh. “He won’t accept it. Neither will Carein. The two of them feed off each other’s madness on it.” He kicked at another rock. “I’m worried about him. All of us are.”

“Ask my dad,” Jason offered. “And he’ll say Tonza’s always been unbalanced and unstable. Nothing new to see here and all that. He’ll be fine. Just make sure you’re near him when he finally accepts it and breaks.” He lifted the device high into the air and let out a somewhat disappointed huff. “Damn, I hope this thing is working, or at least properly calibrated to this rock and the bio-data of who we’re looking for.”

“And that is?”

“No idea, really,” Jason admitted as he stepped over a curb and onto the herringbone design of the pathway toward the main building. “Just that it’s a transtemporal criminal. Someone that my father wants locked away in Shada for the rest of his lives.”

“Gallifreyan?”

“I think so.” He pursed his lips and let out a huff. “Not often I get sent into the field with little to no intel. But that’s what happens when my father decides on a task.”

“Ahhhh,” Jamie hummed out with a smile and a dip in his stride as he walked. “But that just makes it so much more fun, doesn’t it?”

“If you want to call it that. I’d much prefer to…” he paused at the low throaty chuckle of his cousin at his side. The low chuckle shifted to an almost frantic boisterous sound of pure amusement. He gave him a glare of annoyance. “Now what’s gotten you all chuckling like a Raargal?”

Jamie dipped backward with a laugh, threw himself into a forward lean and held himself in place with his hands on his knees. “Oh Jase. Your dad. He’s really something else, you know?” a Gallifreyan swear, one of the milder ones, shuddered out of his mouth to precede his next words. “That man is in my hearts, he really is. Didn’t’ think he could sear himself any deeper inside them. But he just did! _Brilliant_. Completely in my hearts!”

“Alright,” Jason moaned out. “What’s he done now?”

Jamie remained in his forward lean but managed to take on of his hands from his knees to point forward. “Check that out. Just look at it and be rendered in complete and utter awe toward the love and devotion he has toward himself.“

Jason looked first at his cousin with a perplexed expression, then followed the line of his arm to look up at he building. “What are you?” His eyes shot wide. “Oh. Oh, by the Gods…”

Jamie managed to lever himself up to a stand and threaded his arm across his cousin’s shoulder. He still laughed but had managed to calm it down more to a chuckle of thrill. “Irving Braxiatel,” he boomed out with amusement as he swept an arm across the air in front of them. “The brilliant and amazing Irving Braxiatel presents to you the _Braxiatel Collection_. Look upon the majesty of me with awe and reverence.”

“I’ve never been so embarrassed,” Jason muttered under his breath as he gazed with horror up at the banner depicting his father in a theatrically regal visage. “And it’s not even _me_ in that picture.”

A young woman with a swoon in her voice sighed as she passed by the pair. “Isn’t he just beautiful? What I would give to be able to spend a lifetime waking up to a face like that?”

Jamie’s amusement quickly fled toward surprise. His mouth gaped just lightly at the wink of the woman as she turned and headed up the stairs toward the main doors. “Oh. Well. Looks like he’s got an admirer or few – despite clearly being in love with himself.”

“Give it a rest, Jamie,” Jason pleaded. 

Jamie tilted to one side as he pulled his phone from his trouser pocket. “Back it up a bit, Jase. I want to get a picture of you with it.” He gave his shoulder a push to move him closer to the wall. “Come on. See if you can pull off the same self-righteous superhero pose as the old man.”

“I hate you,” Jason grumped. “Enough of this, yeah? We’ve got a job to do.”

“It can wait a minute. This is way more important.”

“Jamie, I’m warning you.”

“Well. If you won’t, I will,” he sang. He thrust his phone into his cousin’s hand. “Come on. Let’s do this. It’ll be fodder for our amusement and relentless teasing for at least the next century!” He walked toward the wall and flicked the angled hem of his black and white tunic to straighten it out. “Wait, get my good side, yeah.” He puffed out his chest and held his shoulders back. He even took the time to smooth out the sides of his hair to make himself as presentable as possible. He frowned and shot his cousin a glare of impatience to see him standing with his arms folded across his chest with clear annoyance. “Oh, come on, Jase. Lighten up.”

“Keep it up and I disown you as a cousin.”

“Don’t be like that, man. Come on.” He slouched backward with a moan. “You are no fun any –” he oomphed when a shoulder lightly collided with his. “Hey, watch it, yeah?”

“So sorry,” Rose murmured with a light smile of apology as she moved past him. “Very sorry. Wasn’t watching where I was going…”

“Mum?” he breathed out in reply as his face lengthened to fall into an expression of sadness and longing toward her quickly retreating back. 

~~oooOOOooo~~

Rose barely felt the heat at all as she burst out from the cover of shade and into the bright, hot sun that blazened overhead. She didn’t feel the whip of her skirts around her ankles, nor the sting of hot winds on her shoulder. All she felt was the erratic beating of her heart in her chest. One heart, not two. One.

She held her fist against her chest and steadied her breathing as she stalked across the thick and lush grasses of the gardens toward a large fountain at the very centre of it. Ordinarily, she would stop and stand in awe at such a magnificently crafted centrepiece. And it was very magnificent in its design. The spray of the fountain was a dance of water, with the jets swaying and twisting to create beautiful imagery around a pedestal of magnificent stone-carved statues of white marble and granite that stood at its centre.

Rose was unable to appreciate it in all its majesty in this moment, however. Not with the pounding of her heart, the shortness in her breath, and the confusion clouding her mind. All she could do was to stare into the glistening waters and try to control her thoughts and her breathing. Deepening her breaths and trying to control it was worse on the swimming of her mind than her panting was, and she swayed a little in place trying to maintain her stand.

“God,” she breathed to herself as she lowered herself into a crouch and mindlessly undid the clasps of her leather sandals. “It’s so fucking hot here.”

“Not as hot as it is on Steccin,” Bernice’s voice filtered in from behind her. “Nor as hot as Issea on a Winter’s day. Spend a bit of time there, and I promise you that you’ll find KS-159 cool by comparison.”

Rose kicked off her sandals to press her feet into the grasses. She turned her head to look toward Bernice as she steppe dup beside her. “You’re Brax’s friend,” she stated softly. “Bernice, yes?”

“Bernice, yeah,” she answered with a one sided smile and a look forward at the statues beyond the dancing waters. “But Brax’s friend?” she let out a small laugh. “That status changes on an hourly basis.”

“Tell me about it,” Rose agreed with a laugh. The laugh quickly faltered. “An’ although I love him with everythin’ in me, there are days I question why.”

“Yes, so I heard,” she admitted on a quiet voice. “Your telephone conversation with him didn’t exactly ooze a deep and loving friendship between the both of you.” She tried to hide the smile but was mostly unsuccessful. “A little more swearing, threat, and insult than one would expect between friends.”

Rose lifted her brows. “Says the one threatenin’ to murder him.”

“And it would be justifiable homicide,” she said with a light growl in her voice. “When he gets bored, that old bastard and his practical jokes…”

“Dare I ask?”

Bernice let out a long breath that did hold the slightest amount of humour within it. “Put it this way: Braxiatel doesn’t do things in half measure. He has a lot of time, money, and resources at his disposal.” She cleared her throat. “And seems to forget that the rest of us don’t have the same kinds of resources at ours. I lost three weeks and potentially fruitful dig because of him.” Her nose wrinkled. “Fuvus got that site. Took it right out from under me.”

Rose pursed her lips and nodded. “Yep. You’re right. Definitely grounds for justifiable homicide. Though,” she looked upward to the very top of an arch of water that curled and fell back into the fountain. “In his current incarnation, you’d need another eleven bullets to make it stick.” She looked back to Bernice. “Got enough for the job?”

Bernice frowned with puzzlement when she looked back to Rose. “I’m not quite sure I follow what you’re saying.”

“Although I am told that a bullet or a knife in each of his hearts is also effective in suppressing the regenerative process. You could try that.” She held up her skirt just lightly and walked slowly toward the fountain edge.

Bernice remained silently behind her for a moment trying to determine exactly what this woman was talking about.

“I’m Rose, by the way,” Rose called over her shoulder as she straightened up and let the mist of the fountain wash across her face.

“I’m sorry?”

“Rose,” she repeated with a twist in her body to look back at Bernice. “We didn’t exactly get introduced back in the gallery.” She turned back to the water. “Figured you might want to know my name if Brax sent you out here on baby sitting duty.”

Bernice moved from where she had been fixed in place to once again stand at Rose’s side. “What makes you think I’m here because of him?”

“It’s his style,” she answered with a smile. “Protective and then some, although I have to admit that I didn’t expect it from a version of him who hasn’t exactly met me yet.” She tilted her head. “Well. That’s just met me at any rate.”

“I believe it was at the request of your lady President.”

“Of course,” Rose breathed out softly. “Of course she’d ask. And he won’t deny her anything.”

“Interesting,” Bernice said with a somewhat sly smile on her face. “And just how does Brax know the Gallifreyan Princess, anyway.”

“Princess,” Rose echoes with a laugh up into the sky. “Oh, she’s anything but a princess. All class, beauty, an authority, yeah, but can she kick an arse when she needs to. Ball busting Wonder Woman, she is.”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t tell me how he knows her.” She shifted her eyes toward Rose. “And on what appears to be such _friendly_ terms.”

Rose didn’t miss the light flare of teasing in Bernice’s eyes. It made her smile. “He was a member of her council for nearly two centuries,” she answered with a shrug. “And really, any Gallifreyan in this timeline knows who she is…”

“Hold on a minute,” Bernice managed out with a wave in her hand and a wince on her face. “Brax was on Romana’s council of Lords? As in the High Council of Gallifrey?”

“I see you’ve heard of it,” Rose answered with a light laugh. “Yeah. That’s the one. He was a Cardinal. Not quite on the High Council at the time. But rumours are that he made it to Chancellor before he got himself exiled for nefarious acts against the laws of time.”

Her face hell toward complete understanding at that revelation. “Well. Yes. That’s more along the lines of the Brax I know.”

“Isn’t it just,” Rose agreed with a laugh. She looked down and dipped her toe in the water. “So cool…”

“Still, there’s something I don’t quite understand,” Bernice pressed curiously. “How did Brax end up on the Gallifreyan Council? Don’t you have to be a Time Lord?”

“Yes,” Rose answered almost distractedly. “It is the Time Lord Council, afterall.”

“Are you saying that Brax…” She looked back to the building with a hard pinch in her brow. She then looked back to Rose with eyes wide with horror. “Irving _Braxiatel_ … him … that, that rich, over pompous, rude, selfish bastard is a _Time Lord_?”

“I dunno why you’re questioning it,” Rose said with a laugh. “You’ve described pretty much all of the Time Lord council members I’ve ever met.”

Bernice was held firm in place, her eyes wide with question for a long moment. Finally, her eyes seemed to clear and her expression fell to one more accepting of the news. “Yeah. You’re right, of course.” She frowned just lightly. “I really don’t know why I didn’t work it out years ago.” She exhaled a humph. “Well, I’ll be. An actual Time Lord.”

Rose smiled and let the tip of her tongue settle into the corner of her mouth as she stepped off the edge and into the shallow fountain waters. “You know the Doctor, right?”

“Yes,” Bernice answered with an inhale. “I’ve met him a few times. Travelled with him a little.” She looked around them. “You know, it’s against the Laws of Brax for anyone to walk inside the fountain.”

“I don’t care,” she sang out with a smile as she turned to face Bernice and walked backward, deeper into the waters. “Do you?”

“No, I suppose not,” she admitted with a shrug. “If you don’t mind the wrath of Brax, then have fun. I’m not going to stop you.”

“I really don’t mind,” Rose said with an indignant shrug. “And ‘sides. I’m already mad at him, so this should just balance it out, yeah?” she twirled in the water, enjoying the downward fall of the water from the fountain jets. “And if he get’s too gnarly and unreasonable, then I’ll sic the Doctor on him. They love a good row, the two of them.” 

“Yes,” Bernice purred with a light waggle in her brow. “Brax might have mentioned that you are the Doctor’s wife.”

“Might have mentioned it?” Rose asked asked with a smile as she held her now very wet hair back over her shoulder. “Or used it as deliberate incentive for you to babysit his wayward Sister in Law?”

A fast look of horror crossed over Bernice’s face. “Oh. I suppose that would make you his sister in law, wouldn’t it?” she realised. “I didn’t think of that.”

“Join me,” Rose offered with an extension of her hand and a wiggle of her fingers. “Cool off a bit.”

“I best not,” she answered with a shake of her head.

“Worried about getting in trouble with Brax?” She shook her head and laughed. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about old Braxie. I’ve got your back if he gets out of joint over it.”

Bernice’s brows lifted high at the obvious challenge. “Oh. I’m not worried about the wrath of Braxiatel.”

“Course you are,” Rose said with a sniff. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be standing there sweatin’ more water than what’s in this fountain and arguin’ on it.” She danced in the water, a sing song in her voice. “Who’s afraid of the big bad Brax, the big bad Brax, oh who’s afraid of the big bad Brax, la la la la la?”

“Not me,” Bernice said as she very quickly shed her vest and messenger back. She kicked off her boots at the same time she undid the weapon holster on her thigh. She jumped, rather than stepped into the water. “Definitely not me.” She lifted her face to receive the spray of water and let out a long sigh of relief. “Goddess, this is wonderful.”

“Isn’t it?” she agreed with a sigh. “Must be a Gallifreyan thing that made Brax choose this rock to put his collection. Perpetual scorching summer days and all…”

“I’ve heard that about the place. Never been there, so I really don’t know.”

“Beautiful in its prime,” Rose said with a longing smile. “And one day, I’m sure it’ll be beautiful again.”

Bernice stood underneath the water, a look of curiosity on her face. “What happened?”

“Daleks,” Rose answered with darkness in her eyes. “Millions and millions of Daleks.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, shit. You. You can’t say anything to Brax about that. It’s centuries from now in his timeline, and knowin’ him…” She exhaled. 

“Don’t say anything more,” Bernice said knowingly. “I’ll keep it to myself.”

Rose stopped dancing to simply take an appreciative look around her. “This is beautiful,” she remarked with a sigh. “Like, incredibly beautiful. Wonder where he got all this stuff.”

“From all over the universe,” Bernice offered. “He has an entire army of archaeologists and specialists at his disposal collecting all sorts of precious artifacts and artwork.” She lifted her chin to the pedestal of statues in the centre of the fountain. “Those, he procured from Earth before the fall of the Empires in the thirtieth century. Roman art from the second century as is my understanding. The depictions of the Gods of that era.”

Rose’s eyes widened in time with a brilliant multi-watt grin. “Really?”

Bernice watched curiously as Rose lifted her already sodden skirt to run across the width of the fountain toward the pedestal. “What are you doing?”

Rose stumbled just lightly as she skipped over a fountain head, which drew gleeful laughter from her as the jet shot up a hard stream of water against the back of her skirt as she made it past. “Just checking something out,” she said with cheer. “I have to know if … if it’s here!”

Bernice held her hair back from her face. “If what’s there?”

Rose turned a twirl with her walk. “Me.”

“You?”

“Oh yes,” she laughed. “Me. The Goddess Fortuna.”

Bernice scowled just lightly with worried curiosity and followed behind Rose. She wasn’t’ entirely comfortable with walking so far away from the grasses and leaving her weapons and boots unattended. Not to forget further inviting the wrath of Brax if he knew a quick paddle was turning in a full flaunting of his rules. She exhaled a long sigh. He had told her to keep an eye on the woman, she had a decent enough excuse.

“Wait for me,” she called. “And yes, Fortuna is there. Don’t quite know how that involves you, though.”

Rose stepped onto a small lip at the edge of the pedestal and held onto the ankle of the statue standing above her. With a rise of her head into the sunlight, she peered up the length of the statue that was, indeed, the careful and loving creation of a man she loved above all others.

“Oh my God. It’s here!”

“Might want to be careful,” Bernice warned. “Those statues aren’t cemented in place but just put there. If that thing falls and breaks, there will be hell to pay for all of us.” She shook her head. “And I don’t think even your Doctor would be able to quell the resulting storm.”

Rose didn’t lower her face or her eyes. She looked up at the image of herself with a much younger face, and a body free of stretch marks and scars with a sense of awe. “I won’t break it, Bernice. And if I did, I can always just ask the Doctor to make another one.”

“ _Another_ one?”

Rose’s face was a brilliant glow when she looked back down to her new friend. There was a glint in her eye and pride in her voice. “Yes. He was the one who carved this statue.” She looked up again. “In Rome. Carved her in my image.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Bernice growled. “This is an Ursus original piece, part of a series of statues.”

Rose hummed in the negative. “No, this is a Theta Sigma original. Carved it by hand, he did. Took a sculpting course with Michaelangelo and created…” her smile faltered just a little. “Created by hands who knew his subject so well, who knew every curve of her so well that he could recreate her from memory alone.” A distant look took fell across her features as she recalled his quiet attempt to tell her how he felt about her back then, even when they were becoming so strained and distant. “Oh, Doctor…”

Bernice didn’t notice the faraway look in Rose’s eyes. She was far too focused on the statue that towered above them, and just how much she certainly did resemble the woman beside her. “So, this piece. It’s not a Ursus?”

“No,” Rose answered softly. “It’s wholly the creation of the Doctor. He made it for me…” She looked to Bernice with awe in her eyes. “God, Bernice. He loved me. Back then he loved me so much…”

“Well, he married you, so I would hope so.”

Rose shook her head. “No. Not him. Not _that_ him.” She drew in a breath. “I thought he didn’t love me. Not then. Not back then … or ahead in the time of the one who did.” 

“I don’t follow.”

“Yeah, tenses are something else in the relationship of me and the Doctor,” she admitted. A smile graced her lips. “But he loved me Bernice. He really, really did.” She looked to the shore. “I need to see him. God, I need to go home and see him.”

“If your President isn’t ready to go, then I don’t think you’re getting home any time soon,” she said with a somewhat apologetic shrug. 

“Yeah,’ Rose agreed with a slow nod and a light huff. “We do have a purpose for being here, after all, I suppose.” She shrugged and rolled her eyes to one side. “And it’s a pretty important one.”

“Well my dear,” a rather amused voice with a slight scratchy effect to it called in from only a few feet away. “What could possibly be more important to you than getting home … well … home to me?”

Rose and Bernice quickly shot looks of alarm toward a man standing in the fountain with them. His yellow trousers were rolled up to the knee, held up by a pair of bright suspenders over the top of a white long sleeved shirt. A light green silken tie dotted with small white polka dots hung down along his chest. His hair was a mess of blonde curls that had yet to be petted down by the droplets of water raining down from the water jets.

Bernice quickly took a step forward to put herself between Rose and the newcomer. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she warned him darkly. “Braxiatel banned you from the Collection…”

Rose took Bernice’s sudden protection as a sign that this individual wasn’t really a nice sort of person. She peered around her shoulder at the man, narrowing her gaze as she tried to suss out whether or not she might know who he was.

“Who is he?” she asked curiously. 

“No one you need to know,” Bernice warned darkly. 

He looked toward her then, a grin spreading across his face. “And why not, Bernice? After all, she’s my wife, isn’t she?”

“No, she isn’t,” Bernice corrected him. “I know who you are. We all do,” she warned. “And you are not the man she married.”

“Bernice?” Rose pressed with rising worry inside her chest. “Who is he?”

“Why my dear,” he answered for Bernice. “How can you not know me? The man you married.”

“What?”

“Rose, don’t listen to him,” Bernie warned when Rose stepped around her to investigate. “Stay behind me.”

“You?” Rose asked. “You’re…?”

“My darling wife,” he greeted with a smile and a light bow. “I’m the Doctor. Pleasure meet you.”

~~oooOOOoooo~~


	53. Hello Doctor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose meets her husband form another dimension

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Monday wasn't my friend today, it really wasn't. 
> 
> But I did get a chapter done... :)
> 
> I sincerely hope that you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

Jason could read the look on his cousin’s face clearer than if it had subtitles and explicit descriptives surrounding it. His elevated and jovial mood had just suddenly crashed down beyond sub-level.

Now. While Jamie being removed of his over-eager and far too jesting behaviour was oftentimes a blessing, the complete demoralisation he could see right now was a part of the emotional spectrum of his cousin that could lead them both toward untold dangers. Him being upset was at the same level as him being furious: His brain stopped working, and he ran on emotion alone.

He had seen this firsthand after their mothers and their boss went missing. James went on an absolute bender of fury across all of space and time, ready to tear it all apart to find them. It took the efforts of their fathers, and of each one of their siblings to find him and pull him back toward some sense of normalcy.

But that wasn’t before Jamie had encountered Mark’s sometimes- _here_ -mostly- _there_ “wife” for the first time. James kept tight-lipped about had happened during that “adventure,” although he showed an immense amount of guilt and regret from it. It was immediately following that adventure that his cousin decided to stop running riot, start listening to his family, and start to behave himself.

What in the name of Omega had happened to flip Jamie’s switch like that?

Curiously, it was at the minor collision that occurred between he and a blonde woman next to that blasted five-storey banner of his father. He looked upward at it and let his fingers curl around his staser as he considered the best way to set that thing alight.

…That can wait for now…

He looked down to his cousin and made a slow and cautious approach. “Jamie?”

James didn’t look in his direction. His eyes were locked on the back of the retreating form of the blonde. “Did you see her?” he asked with a light croak in his voice.

“See who?”

“Mum,” he answered quietly without a gesture toward the woman.

Jason let out a long breath. “Jamie,” he began slowly, cautiously. “I’m sorry, man. But your mum … my mum … they’re gone.” He stepped up beside him and put an arm across his shoulder. “Your hearts will trick your eyes from time to time.” He exhaled. “I see Mum all the time as well. Clara does, too. She says it’s a normal part of the grieving process.”

Jamie shook his head slowly. His eyes were still on her as she walked toward the fountain. “No, Jase. That was her, I know it was.”

“I wish it was, man,” he said softly. “I’d give anything to see her again, I really would. Miss her hugs and the way she’d challenge Father to ease up the …” he started to chuckle. “The hold of the rod up his arse and let me have some fun.”

“The only one with balls enough to say something like that to your dad,” James said with his own light chuckle. 

“And she doesn’t even have a set…” Jason added with a real laugh.

James took a step forward, enough that his cousin’s arm dropped completely from his shoulder. “I’m going to go check.”

“Jamie, don’t,” Jason pleaded with a groan. “Man, we’re here on assignment. We really shouldn’t waste time…”

“Five minutes,” James insisted with only a slight twist in his trunk to hold up five fingers. “That’s all. Just five.”

“Don’t do this to yourself, Cuz,” he warned. “It’ll only hurt more.” 

“Outta my way,” a brunette ordered with a smirk as she stalked by in between the pair of them. She paused to take a quick look around, then looked toward the pair. “Did either of you see a pretty blonde go by here.” She held her hand up next to her head. “About this tall. Slim, but not skinny. Probably cursing Braxiatel under her breath.” She reconsidered that. “Or maybe not quite _under_ her breath.”

She didn’t get any form of answer from either of them. Jason and Jamie merely watched on with wide eyes and slightly gaped mouths.

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” she said with a somewhat frustrated huff in her voice. She then looked both of them up and down. With a groan in his voice she slouched a little and rolled her eyes. “I know those uniforms. CIA, right? Part of the Lady President’s escort team, are you?”

Jamie’s brows lifted. There hadn’t been a female president on Gallifrey since his mother. “Ahh. Yes. Yes, we are,” he spluttered out. “Is she here, then? _Romanadvoratrelundar_?”

“That’s a hell of a mouthful,” she muttered with a slight flare of her eyes. “Sounds about close to it.”

“She’s here?” Jason repeated.

“What, did the two of you get lost along the way?” she asked with a laugh. “Great pair of protective escorts the pair of you are.” She thumbed toward the building. “Yeah, she’s here. In with Braxiatel getting appropriately coddled and sucked up to. All her needs and wants being met and all that.” She blew out a breath and looked across to the carpark. “Must be nice…”

James gulped over a dried tongue. “And you’re looking for Rose?”

Bernice looked back toward him. “Is that her name?” She frowned just slightly thinking back to her brief conversation with Braxiatel. “Yes, that’s right. Brax called her Rose.”

James shot a look toward his cousin. It was a look of pleading. 

Jason did his best to ignore it. “The Lady Rose went to the gardens,” he advised quietly. “To the fountain, I believe.”

“Oh. Cheers,” she called out with a smile of relief. “Brilliant.”

She said nothing else as she moved into a half jog toward the fountain.

James swallowed a thick gulp, his eyes watching the retreat of the professor who taught archaeology part-time at the Academy. “That’s Professor Summerfield,” he murmured.

“Yes,” Jason agreed. “Which means that the woman she’s looking for isn’t your mum.”

“Yes it is,” he argued lightly. He shifted a look toward his cousin. “Just not the one from our timeline.”

“Which means you can’t go to her,” Jason warned. “So don’t even ask.”

“Five minutes,” he said with a hoarse whisper. “Just let me see her, Jase. Just a look.”

“And act like a damn creeper hiding out in the bushes, Jamie?” he barked out. “Come on. No. This isn’t what we were sent here for. At least I hope not. It would put my father at the extreme end of particularly cruel if we were.”

“Five minutes,” James repeated as he strode forward. “That’s it. And I promise you we can leave.”

Jason dipped his back to throw his head back as he let out a long-suffering moan. “Ugh. We don’t exactly have the time for this.”

James turned to face his cousin and walked backward toward the gardens. “Tell me you’re not thinking the same about your mum being inside there with your dad.” He gestured toward the building.

“No, I’m not!” he barked out sharply. “Because I’m not an idiot. I know she’s _not_ my mother; she’s an earlier version of her; a ghost; a woman whose timeline I don’t even exist in yet.”

“That’s woprat shit, and you know it,” James said with a snarl in his voice as he continued to walk backward. “Omega, you sound like your dad sometimes.” He snorted. “Then again, doubt he’d hesitate to walk back along his own timeline like this. Kind’ve his specialty, isn’t it?”

“Get back here, Jamie.”

“Nope,” he popped back petulantly. “Can’t stop me, won’t even try…”

Jason’s eyes narrowed and he launched forward in a run. “Don’t be so sure of that.”

James’ eyes widened and he let out a peep. “Sepulchasm,” he yelped out as he turned into a stumble and ran awkwardly out across the field.

“I’m going to kill you, James. Put you into regeneration, I swear!”

~~oooOOOooo~~

“My darling wife,” he greeted with a smile and a light bow. “I’m the Doctor. Pleasure meet you.”

“She is _not_ your wife,” Bernice corrected with a growl in her voice. “And you … you are not the Doctor.” She sniffed indignantly. “Well. At least not the Doctor that _I_ know.”

“My dear woman, that’s because you’ve never met me,” he countered with a light and one-sided smirk. He remained lightly stopped forward in his bow. “I think you’ll find that if you give me a chance and get to know me a little, then you’ll find I am very much the Doctor you know.” He straightened up. “There are, after all, Thirteen of me across this universe.”

“Fourteen,” she corrected with a snarl. “And you’re not any one of the Thirteen who are, oh, how do I put this: _Indigenous_ to this dimension.”

“Bernice,” Rose said quietly over her shoulder. “I’m really not sure I follow.”

“You really don’t need to,” she spoke over her shoulder. “But it’s important that what you do follow is that this guy equals bad. Okay?”

The Doctor held out his hand in invitation. “Oh, don’t listen to her, my Beloved wife.” He kept his hand out but looked toward Bernice. “It’s jealousy on her part. Jealous that my hearts quite obviously belong to another.”

“Jealous of _what_?” Bernice barked out with a laugh in her voice. “Of her taking a fancy to _you_? The walking technicoloured yawn that you are. I think not, thank you very much.” She made a point of looking him up and down. “There is not enough Draconian Brandy in the universe…”

“Oh, my dear Bernice…”

“Don’t you _dear Bernice_ me, _dear_ ,” she snarled indignantly. “Now how about you rack off back into the hole you’ve been hiding out in these past few years before I have security descend on all of us. Braxiatel will take great pleasure in driving his foot up your arse and sending you back to whatever dimension you crawled out of.”

“Might be tough to do that without this,” he countered with a smirk as he held up a hand with a thin communication device. 

Bernice petted her pockets and let out a long moan to realise that it was her phone. That’s right, she had it in the messenger bag that she left on the edge of the fountain when she foolishly allowed herself to be drawn into lowering her guard to mess about in Braxiatel’s bloody fountain.

And of course her knife and her gun was also in that bag.

“Oh for ….” 

He hummed and flipped the phone in his hand a single time. “Bit of an outdated model this one,” he remarked, holding it between his finger and thumb on an outstretched arm over the water. “Not entirely waterproof.”

“Oh, don’t you dare,” she warned him. “I need that.”

“Do you now.”

“Yes, I do,” she confirmed. “I’ve got contacts in there that I ….” She groaned out a long sound of annoyance at the plopping sound of the device into the knee-height water of the fountain. She let her eyes lock on the sinking phone. “Oh _come_ on. Ugh. I really hate having to set up a new phone, and I’ve only had that one for two months.”

“Such a shame,” he sang out with false apology in his tone. “Maybe the next time you’ll keep a closer eye on it.” He looked back toward Rose and held out his hand once again. “Now, my beautiful little temporal anomaly. Come to your adoring husband.”

“Yeah,” she drawled. “Think I might stay here for now, ta.”

He took a step forward, his arm still held outward. “Don’t be like that, dear.”

Bernice quickly held up a hand in a definite and unquestioning gesture for him to stop. “Stay back,” she warned him with a snarl in her voice. “One step closer and you’ll regret it.”

“Oh?” he sang out with a widening in his eyes that drew out a sparkle in his eye. “And just what do you plan to do?”

“Well,” she said with a light shrug in her shoulder. “I hadn’t exactly thought past just making the threat.” She raised her finger to point at him. “But I promise you, it’ll be good. Something good, so good, and you’ll absolutely regret coming any closer at all.”

“I have my phone on me,” Rose said quietly. 

“Give it to me.”

Rose dug into her pocket and handed it over. “Ehm, just so you know…”

Bernice held up the phone and made a show of holding it in front of her toward him. “More than one phone between us, _Doctor_.”

Rose cleared her throat. “But. Might be good to mention that I’ve really only got Brax on it. Future Brax whose pissed off with me right now … but my chances of him actually answering it are pretty slim.”

“He doesn’t need to know that bit,” she said through her teeth. She lifted her chin. “Now. If you don’t back off, then I’ll be forced to call security.”

“If you were going to,” he said with a laugh. “You’d have already done it by now.” He drew in a deep breath. “But the fact of the matter is this, Professor Summerfield, is that you’ve managed to find yourself in the rather precarious position of being out of contact with the security teams with someone who is so far out of her own time, that it’s extremely unlikely that her rather cheap communications device there would be able to be utilized in any kind of useful manner to either of you.”

“Hardly cheap,” Rose muttered with a moan. “Brax’s Time Capsule gave that to me.”

“Hold on,” Bernice coughed out with a turn of her head to talk along her shoulder at Rose. “Brax has a Time Capsule?”

“Yeah,” she breathed in reply. “He’s a time Lord, of course he does.”

“Of course,” she said with a roll in her eyes. “Of course, he does.” Her hand shot up again when the Doctor dared take another step forward. “If you don’t mind. Stay where you are, we’re forming a plan against you right now.”

“Are we _really_?” Rose asked with a light snort of amusement. 

“Actually,” she admitted. “Right now, I’m stalling for time.”

“Why?”

“Because right up there,” she flicked her eyes up to the entrance of the gardens. “We’ve got two of your escort party on their way down.” She frowned at the way the two men seemed to be playing a game of TAG against each other rather than behaving in the typically stoic manner of escort agents. “What are they…?”

“Escort party?” She asked. “Ehm. We don’t have any escort.”

“The President of Gallifrey travelling without escort?” she scoffed. “I hardly believe that for a moment.”

“Yeah, about that…”

“Anyway,” she huffed out. “There’s a pair of Gallifreyan penguins on the lawns right now. If we can keep him from getting nearer to you, get their attention, then we can let them handle him.”

“CIA?” Rose queried, her eyes on the pair of agents running erratically around down the grassy hill that surrounded the fountain. Her brows lifted in both shock and confusion at their apparent game. Clearly these were two agents who were not in agreement about _something_. Old Narvin would be quite upset to furious about this level of undistinguished behaviour. “They’re not here for me, but I think I can get their attention.”

“Might be a good idea to get on that, yeah?”

Rose leaned around Bernice and cupped her hands around her mouth. After a deep inhale, she bellowed out a request for assistance in flawless Gallifreyan that sang across the grasses toward the two men. Immediately, the both of them ceased whatever game they were playing. Their stasers were drawn and they were on the run toward the fountain before either of the two men had even looked in her direction.

“Looks like we have the Gallifreyan Police on route,” Bernice said with a smirk of victory toward the Doctor.

“Not quite the police,” Rose corrected softly.

“Is it _really_ the time, Rose?” Bernice barked in reply. “I’m trying to sound cool with victory here, just play along?” Her victorious smile faltered just slightly that the Doctor seemed to welcome the two men into the fray. He stared at Rose with an almost filthy grim. “Ehm. You’re about to be arrested, Doctor. Less happiness, more worry if you wouldn’t mind.”

“We have a child together, dear?” he questioned. “Did I actually sire you a child?” He grinned. “Well, isn’t _that_ interesting?”

“What is he talking about?” Bernice queried.

“In the name of the Celestial Intervention Agency, you will step back from those women,” Jason growled with warning. His staser was drawn and held with both hands at his shoulders in a warning aim.

“Both are protected under the articles 12, section 3 of the Agency,” James added with warning in his tone. His weapon was also at aim, in a manner very similar, but not quite identical, to his cousin. “Under protective orders of his Lord President Braxiatel.”

“President Braxiatel?” the Doctor scoffed. “How in the name of Rassilon did Braxiatel rise toward Presidency of Gallifrey? Who did he have to kill?”

“I want to ask the same question,’ Bernice added with surprise.

“Rassilon had nothing to do with it,” Jason snarled as he stepped from the ledge of the fountain and into the water. He didn’t seem to notice at all that the water sloshed up higher than the height of his black boots. “Now back away from Lady Rose and her escort.”

“Excuse me, I am no escor – “ She stopped at a loud shush from Rose. “Yes, right. Play along…”

The Doctor looked toward Jason with an expression of annoyance. “Well. Like father, like son, with all his arrogance of superiority.” He then looked toward James and his expression softened. “Really, Son. Holding a weapon on your father? That’s hardly the way to greet your old man, is it?”

James didn’t exactly lower his weapon, but he did shift his head to look around it. “Dad?” His brows pinched with confusion. “What’re you doing here? Now?”

“I just wanted to see my family,” he cooed with a darkened smile. “My _wife_ , and now, my _son_.”

“Don’t buy into it, Jamie,” Jason warned. “His telepathic signature. It’s off.”

“Yeah,” James agreed. “I can feel it.”

“Just out of my time, that’s all,” the Doctor advised with a beaming grin. He held open his arms. “Come here, son. Give your dad a hug.”

“Yeah,” he drawled along a breath. His hands tightened their hold on his staser. “Might give that a bit of a miss, ta. Not exactly a cuddler in this body.” He flicked his eyes to Rose. “You okay, Mum?”

“Well so much for keeping _that_ quiet,” Jason muttered with a growl. “Forget about timelines and all that, Cuz. _Well done_.”

“Oh, shut up,” he snapped. “The old man already gave it away, yeah? What do you want me to do, lie about it?”

“Lady Rose,” Jason called out. “If you wouldn’t mind, can you and Ms. Summerfield please walk around and join us? Don’t worry about this imposter, we have you covered.”

“The child of an anomaly,” the Doctor murmured under his breath as both Rose and Bernice stepped off the ledge of the pedestal and took the wide berth toward the two CIA agents. “Which makes you as burnable as she is… My son or not.”

James’ eyes flashed at that ominous warning from his not-quite-father. “I’m sorry? What did you just say?”

“You absolutely reek of irregularity and abomination,” he snarled with a slide of his hand around his hip toward his pocket.

“What?” James made a show of sniffing toward his armpit, not faltering in the hold of his weapon at all. “I showered before I came here.”

“The stench of your very soul,” the Doctor snarled with threat as he whipped his hand around brandishing what looked like a hastily cobbled together weapon. “Must be burned from all existence.”

“No!” Rose cried out as she launched from where she was. “Leave him alone!” Her rush took her directly in line between the two men and their target. 

“Tonzarina,” Jason called out sharply. “Get out of the way!”

She was upon the Doctor before he could squeeze off any kind of shot from his weapon. “Leave my son alone!” She collided hard with him, her shoulder colliding with his mid-section to drive them both into the water. They disappeared underneath with a high and loud splash of water those rose taller than any of them stood at full height.

“Mum!” James cried out urgently as he lowered his weapon and ran awkwardly through the water toward her.

Rose lifted up out of the water, her eyes alight with absolute fury toward the man she held under the water with both hands. It was clear that her knees were on his chest to hold him down. “I don’t care who you are – my husband or not – you don’t to harm any one of my children.

Below the water’s surface he looked up at her, blue eyes sparkling with something she couldn’t determine. There was a smile on his face and he lay underneath her with remarkable calm, given that she held him underneath the water with her full weight pressed down on his shoulders.

“Get away, Mum,” James cried out as he stalked as fast as he could through the knee-high waters. Each lift of his leg to clear the water for a forward stride kicked up loud splashes that made him almost inaudible to her. “We’ll handle him.” He looked back to his cousin, who was making his own clumsy way through the water to get to them. “Come on, Jase!”

Bernice was already on her way to the edge of the fountain. She had to send out some form of alert about this – to let security know they had a galactic damn takedown incident happening in the gardens, so it might be nice if someone on the payroll was actually around to help.

…Brax was going to be _pissed_.

Rose continued to hold down the Doctor, the thought that he was her husband as far out of her mind as was possible. Her lip was curled and her breaths a hard growl of fury that anyone would dare go after her child.

Underneath the water, she saw the Doctor smirk and mouth out the words “My beloved …” His smile shifted to a dangerous scowl. “Anomaly.”

She knew that look but didn’t have time to draw in a breath and escape. One of his hands shot up out of the water to curl around her throat. He clutched tightly and used that grasp as leverage to pull himself from the water. She gasped for breaths in his hold, and he could see the strain in her face as it reddened toward purple.

“Let her go,” Jason growled as he lifted his weapon once more. “I will blow your head off, don’t think I don’t have the authority to do it.”

The Doctor shifted his face toward the two CIA agents and smirked as he held up a small device with a red blinking light at its centre. “Ta-ta!” he called out as he depressed a switch on it. “Better luck next time.”

In a flash of blue, both the Doctor and Rose disappeared from the water.

“What the Hell?” Jason cried out with horror. He spun in place. “Where’d they go?”

Jamie dove into the waters, wondering if there may be some depth or cavern toward somewhere else that couldn’t’ be seen from above; or even if he had some way of leeching onto a remaining tendril of energy to take him toward wherever the two of them had disappeared to. A litany of the worst swears he had ever heard come from his uncle exploded from his mouth as he stomped angrily around the waters.

Captured by the shock of Rose’s disappearance and their panic that they had screwed up so spectacularly that the timelines were about to be horrifically and irreparably damaged, neither man saw the approach of the most authoritative figure in both of their lives…

…But they certainly heard him.

“What in the name of Rassilon, Omega, and the Other is going on here?”

James, drenched from tip to toe and looking very much like a sodden drowned rat, turned slowly toward his cousin. Jason, not quite as drenched as James, but definitely wet enough to look far less distinguished as his uniform suggested he should look, shared a look of utter terror with his cousin.

“Oh man. We’re both dead.”

With a gulp, both men slowly turned toward the very edge of the fountain, where the owner of the Braxiatel Collection stood, his chest and shoulders high with rage. It was an exact replication of the posture and power within the banners back at the main building, but with far more fury in his expression.

James let out a low spoken swear, one that was echoed by his cousin at his side. They could take on any creature, any villain, any bad guy across the entire universe without blinking an eye or feeling an ounce of fear. But to stand face to face with an angry Irving Braxiatel? Well the both of them gulped with absolute and clearly visible fear.

“Well?” Braxiatel boomed out in question. “I’m waiting. The CIA are not welcome on this asteroid, nor do you have any authority or jurisdiction here at all.” He looked between both men. Slowly the telepathic signature for them both tapped at his awareness and he felt his hearts thump awkwardly inside his chest. “Oh no,” he breathed out long. “It can’t be…”

Jason held up both hands. “Dad. Look. I can explain.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	54. Busted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jason and Jamie face an angry Brax...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOPS... posted this on the wrong fic..... shifted to the right one now.
> 
> Had a day today, that's for sure. And I wrestled a lot with this chapter, got beaten up, got up to fight again, ended up face down on the mat. Hard to write Brax so different to how he has become in this series....
> 
> Anyway ... not an easy chapter all round... but I hope you enjoy.

Oh, nothing about this was good. Nothing at all. In all his years as a high-ranking field agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency, not once had an assignment gone so bloody pear shaped. At his side, Jason had already fallen into his adolescent surrender position of “hear me out before you ground me, Dad.”

Jamie covered his face in one hand and just waited for it. They really didn’t have time for this right now. Braxiatel was clearly unimpressed, and James didn’t need to look in his direction to know it. He could feel the anger clear across the scant few metres that separated them.

“Jase,” he muttered out quietly from behind his hand. “Make it quick, will you?”

“You had better have a very good explanation for this,” Braxiatel boomed out angrily. “Why it is that you choose to play around in my gardens, and my fountains with clear disregard for the importance of this exhibit and the delicacies of the artwork here.”

James lifted his head from his hand and looked toward his uncle with an expression of incredulity. “Hold on, you think we’re playing?”

Braxiatel shot a glare toward him. “Did I give you permission to speak, young Lord?” He levered a hand upward to gesture toward the less drowned-looking man. “I believe I was speaking to my _son_.” That word seethed out through his teeth. “ _You_ , I will deal with in a moment.”

Indignance and clear defiance took control of James at that moment, but before he could snarl out a reply of his own – and there were a few choice words currently percolating in his mind - Jason’s hand curled warningly around his upper arm.

“Don’t, Jamie. It’s not worth it.”

“I’d listen to him if I were you,” Braxiatel warned. “I am not in the mood right now.”

“If you could just let us explain,” Jason pleaded, all his typical authority well and truly out of his tone. “It’s really not what it looks like.”

“You had better hope not,” he warned. He folded his arms across his chest and straightened up his back. “So. Explain. And do make it quick, I am a busy man.”

Jason curled a lip with thought and lifted his eyes slightly to try and find a decent starting point. “Right. Well. You see, it’s like this…”

Jamie grunted and turned in place to put his back to his uncle and face his cousin. “We don’t have time for this. You can stand there and try to appease your dad all you want. I’m going to find my mother.”

“Might be nice to have his help, don’t you think?” Jason hissed through his teeth without moving his mouth in an attempt to look like he wasn’t talking to his cousin over making explanations to his furious father.

His eyes flicked to Bernice. “Much rather have Professor Summerfield on this one,” he answered. “Because I reckon wherever my father took my mother is going to require her expertise over your father’s specialty of blowing hot air to wheel and deal and generally make people feel like shit.” His eyes shifted toward Bernice, who seemed to be taking in the scene with slight amusement. “How about it? You in?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Can’t think of a better way to kill the three hours I have to wait for him, anyway.” She gestured toward Braxiatel, whose anger had ceased simmering, and was now at a full boil. “But can we do it after the matinee? I’ve just got my popcorn ready.”

Braxiatel had caught small portions of what was being discussed between the two men, but not enough for a full comprehension of all the details. “Are the two of you quite finished?”

“No, not really,” Jamie answered over his shoulder. “Would appreciate another minute if you wouldn’t mind.”

“I most certainly do mind, young Lord.”

“Yeah, tough break on that one then, isn’t it?” he quipped with a turn in the water and a thick, slow wade toward the edge of the fountain. “But I’m here on official CIA business that doesn’t quite concern you…” He looked up for a brief moment as he stepped up onto the edge of the fountain, only five feet away from him. “Despite it being on your orders that we’re here in the first place. I answer to your future self, Sir. Not your current incarnation.”

“I do beg to differ…”

“Right now, in this time stream _and_ incarnation, Sir, you hold no rank in our society.” He grinned at him. “In fact, I hold a higher rank than you do.” The grin fell fast. “So, do excuse me and allow me to do my job.”

Braxiatel grabbed a tight hold of his upper arm. His voice was a low hiss of warning against his ear. “Whatever my rank in society, young Lord, I am still your uncle and therefore will _always_ outrank you. So shelve your petulance and general pathetic attempt at defiance against my will.” His voice lowered to a whisper. “It isn’t wise to defy me in any incarnation, young Lord. Particularly one who is not yet a father, nor an uncle, and is ill-inclined to display any form of familial nurturing toward you.”

“I have a staser and full authority to use it,” Jamie growled low in reply. He held up the weapon in display. “ _With_ regeneration inhibitor.”

Braxiatel’s eyes widened. “I see.”

“And as you were the one who taught me to use it, you can be assured that I am a good and lethal shot if I choose to be.”

Braxiatel actually smiled at that. “Oh, I imagine I’m very proud of you in my future.”

“You are.”

“But that’s my future,” he warned. “Not my present.”

“You won’t _have_ a future if you don’t let go of me right now, Sir.” He sniffed. “My existence isn’t reliant upon your survival.” His face lengthened from petulance to shift toward concern. “However, it is dependent upon my mother’s survival. And right now, she’s a higher priority to me than whether or not you’re in a snit. So, you have a choice: either let me go, or go into regeneration a few centuries ahead of schedule.” He smiled dangerously. “I’m perfectly fine with either.”

He let go of Jamie with a dramatic shift of his arm. Concern finally entered his tone. “What has happened to your mother?”

Jamie didn’t immediately answer as he strode off to one side to pull his sodden tunic up over his head, leaving him in only a tight black pair of trousers tucked inside a squeaky pair of black leather boots, and an equally snug white undershirt. As he wrung out the tunic onto the grass, Jason took up the conversation on his behalf. There was a louder volume to his tone in order to get his father’s attention. “Tonzarina Rose was taken by a transdimentional temporal criminal – one that we were tasked with arresting by Presidential order handed down in our own timeline.” He paused to wait for his father’s full attention. When Braxiatel finally shifted his gaze toward him, he continued. “The reason that Jamie and I were – as you accused – _playing_ in your fountain, was because we were trying to get to her.”

Braxiatel didn’t shift his posture at all, but he did blow out a breath through pursed lips. “I am going to assume that the incarnation of Rose that is in peril is the one that arrived here with Romana and Leela.”

Jason’s brows lifted. “Leela’s here?”

“She is,” Braxiatel confirmed. “She’s currently with your mother up in the offices.” He cleared his throat. “Romana is currently working her out of a hypnotic trance.”

Jason seemed to completely ignore the second sentence spoken by his father. He looked toward his cousin. “Jamie. Leela’s in this timestream. She could be of help in tracking down your father.”

“ _Not_ my father,” Jamie growled. Finally fed up with trying to get his tunic into a dry enough state to wear comfortably, he dropped it into a heap on the grass. “Dad would _never_ treat mum like that. Never. He’d rip his own hearts out of his chest before he’d hurt her like that.” He pulled a familiar tube-like devise from his trouser pocket, then leaned to one side to dip his hand into a small pocket on the outer thigh of his trousers to pull a small case of tiny screwdrivers. “Throw me your scanner, Jase,” he called out before tucking the tube sideways into his mouth and clamping down with his teeth. He held out a hand in expectation of Jason answering to his request.

Jason tossed the device underhanded to him. Smirking at the way Jamie flawlessly snatched it out of the air and immediately began to tinker. “What’re you doing?”

“Recalibrating it now that I know who we’re looking for,” he answered around the tube in his mouth. “The teleport he used was crude, left a decent wake trail that I should be able to follow if…” He spat and spluttered when Jason took the tube from his mouth. “What?”

Jason held the device, a newly minted Sonic Screwdriver, with a wave in front of his face. “Less munching on your toys, and more trying to actually be understandable, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he drawled after a lick at his lip and a roll of his jaw. He looked back down at the device as he opened up the back of it. “Anyway, as I was saying. Father – and I really should come up with a more accurate name for him considering he’s is definitely not my dad…”

“If you are talking about who I think you are,” Braxiatel muttered, all anger now down to a low simmer, seeing as a partial explanation had been offered – albeit in a rather sideways manner. “Then he is known as a Burner. Might I suggest calling him that, instead.” He let out a short sigh. “You are correct in your perception that he is not, in any way, your father.”

“Mr. Burns,” Bernice muttered with a light snicker. 

“Oh, _really_ , Bernice?” Braxiatel growled low and impatiently. “Must you?”

“I must,” she confirmed with her brows high on her forehead and a smirk on her face. “Make sure you ask him where Smithers is, watch him try and work out what you’re talking about.” At not a single laugh from anyone, only three pairs of eyes widely looking at her in a perplexed manner wondering if she’d lost her mind in the past few moments, she let out a long and disappointed sigh. “Oh, come on. That was gold! Not a sense of humour among any of you, is there?”

Jason slowly lifted a hand to point toward Braxiatel. “I’m from him.”

“Yes,” she drawled out long. “How very unfortunate for you.” She looked toward Jamie, who now had the device seated on his elbow and was alternating between using manual screwdrivers and his sonic screwdriver. “Any way, then. Seeing as all of you are nothing but business…”

“Don’t’ put me in the same class as those two,” Jamie countered without looking up from task. “I happen to have a fine sense of humour, thank you.”

“Real class clown you were,” Jason agreed with a droll tone. 

“And yet, I still graduated with higher marks than you.”

“Cheating will often give you that outcome.”

Jamie snorted. “Jealousy thy name is Jason.” He popped the smaller screwdriver in between his teeth and winced as he tugged on a small wire that simply did not want to budge. “Anyway. Mr. Burns was using a teleport that is quite ancient compared to the technology Jase and I have here.” He lightly lifted the device to show it off before digging back into the guts of it. “Outdated by about nine hundred years or so, I’d say. Newer technology means that we stopped leaving Artron traces, oh, about three hundred years ago.” He poked out his bottom lip as he considered that. “Maybe more. I wasn’t born when Dad’n Tonza were working on the new teleporter designs.”

“Oh,” Jason sang out huskily. “So if we can pick up the Arton trace…”

Jamie looked up with a wink in his eye. “Then we know the general location and can refine it from there.” He looked back down. “Not a perfect science, mind. Artron dissipates pretty quickly, but we’ll probably have an area of, oh…”

“Of around one and a half, 2 miles or so,” Jason offered. “Depending on how tightly you can get the calibration on that thing.”

“Yeah, and out in the field,” Jamie said with a light flare in his eyes as he continued working. “Might be on the higher end of that.” He sniffed. “And if he’s gone underground at all, then it’ll widen the search area three-fold at least.”

Jason looked toward his father. “This planetoid. Is it solid ground, or a bit swiss cheesey under foot?”

“I’m not quite sure I follow,” Braxiatel answered. He shifted a look to Benny. “That might be a better question for you to answer, Bernice. It’s more of your specialty…”

“One of many specialties if you want to know,” she answered with a look of light annoyance. She shifted a look toward Jamie. “There are plenty of underground tunnel systems underneath the Collection.”

“Are you familiar at all with the tunnel network?” he queried with a lift of his eyes from the scanner.

“I was part of the cartography team that mapped the tunnels.” She smiled. “Well, not that I’m a cartographer or anything like that. I was more interested in the general age of the rock, and whether or not I might find any interesting artifacts or specimens from the original planet this thing was once part of.”

“Fascinating,” James said with genuine interest. “And did you find anything?”

She shook her head. “Just lots of rocks, dust, and a new species of spider that was declared extinct the day it was discovered.” She shuddered. “No, thank you. Absolutely no bloody thank yous at all. I do believe that Brax has the goo that was scraped off my shoe stored somewhere inside the collection vaults.”

Jamie chuckled and went back to the device in his hand. Jason stood beside his cousin and kept an eye on his progress. “So does that mean we can rely on your escort through the tunnels if need be?”

“Yeah, sure,” she answered with more of a grin of excitement than she really wanted to display. “Could be fun joining the CIA on assignment.”

“I’m not entirely sure that I am comfortable with that,” Braxiatel huffed out. “This Doctor, this Burner, he is quite the dangerous sort. A Time Lord who has killing down to a fine art.”

“But you’re perfectly okay with your son and nephew going in there?” Jason asked quietly. He shared a look with his cousin. “nice to know.”

“Well he has got more than one of you,” Jamie offered with a shrug. “Only has _one_ of her.”

“I will expect that as active field agents for the CIA that you are more than adequately equipped in both skill and knowledge about apprehending dangerous criminals,” Braxiatel cut in firmly. “Additionally, I will expect that the pair of you are capable of regenerating if necessary, which gives you advantage over a human.” He cleared his throat at the wide-eyed looks from both of them. “You _can_ regenerate, correct?”

“Second incarnation,” Jason answered with a thumb against his chest. He flicked the thumb to James. “He’s still on his first, but yes. We can.”

“Then I really can’t see what you are both so upset about.”

“Not quite the fatherly type, are you?” Jamie noted without looking as he closed up the back of the device and used his sonic screwdriver to weld the case together. 

“Admittedly no,” Braxiatel answered. “But you have to admit that as this role of father has been thrust upon me in a rather abrupt manner. Not exactly the appropriate grounds for developing feelings enough to become an appropriate _type_ , such as you’re expecting.”

“Right,” Jamie drawled long. “You can convince yourself of that all you want.” He flicked his eyes toward him. “Though one would expect that the familial bond you share might make it a little easier to achieve, yeah?” He thumbed a series of commands into the touch-pad. “Of course, you’d have to actually _have_ feelings first, yeah?”

“Jamie,” Jason pleaded softly. “Please don’t.”

“Why not, Jase?” he argued on an equally soft tone. “Your old man sends the both of us back here, where we are horrifically faced with the younger faces of our dead mothers, where my dad just happens to be a transdimensional-temporal-bloody-villain that I’m probably going to have to kill if I can’t arrest him, which I probably won’t do because he’s kidnapped my mum…And _no one_ hurts my mum and _survives_ the encounter.” He leaned to one side to put his screwdriver set back into his pocket. “This is cruel, even for him.”

“By the Gods,” Braxiatel breathed to himself with horror. “I did what?”

“I really don’t think he knew,” Jason defended softly with only a short glance toward his horrified father. “Dad has his moments, yeah, but he’s not cruel. Never has been.” He stepped toward his cousin and put a hand on his arm. “We are in his hearts, the both of us. I can’t see him deliberately doing this.”

“Yeah,” Jamie drawled with a croak. “I want to believe that, Jase. I really do.” He looked to Braxiatel, his gaze sad and heartbroken. “But faced with this one, I really can’t.” he shrugged out of his hold and drew in a deep breath. He shook himself out and swallowed down his upset. “But anyway. Can’t stick around to continue to discuss the finer points of being related to Irving Braxiatel, because needs must.” He smirked and held up the device. “Time to do what I do best and track down the bad guy of the hour. You can stick around here if you want. Do pick up my tunic for me and pop it back into the capsule. Laundry basket’s in the bathroom. See you in a bit.”

Jason groaned. “You’re not going alone, Jamie. Wait up.” He looked back and pointed to Braxiatel. “Can you pick up his tunic for him? I’ll collect it when we get back.” He paused a second, then pursed his lips and dipped lightly forward to take the hem of his own tunic in hand. “You know what, this thing’s drenched, too.” He pulled it up over his head and tossed it on the grass beside Jamie’s. “Take them both back for us, if you will.” He didn’t wait for an answer, instead he trotted after his cousin, who walked back toward the fountain, the scanning device held out in front of him in search of a signal.

Braxiatel watched the two young men leave with a sinking feeling inside both of his hearts. So many absolutely terrifying things were said inside of his nephew’s silent rant. Not one part of it he hoped was in any way accurate. 

Bernice let out a long breath and shook her head in a manner that displayed several emotions at once. “Brax. Really. I mean, you’re a lot of things. A whole long and varied list of things containing a lot of names that I’ve used, and haven’t yet found the right circumstance yet to use and have the most impact…” She rattled off a few choice insults under her breath.

“Bernice,” he said softly. “Please don’t. Now really isn’t the time.”

“You’ve got two hearts in that chest of yours,” she noted accusingly. “Do they beat for anyone other than yourself?”

“Go after them Bernice,” he said by way of answering the accusation. “You know this rock like no other. Guide them through there safely.” His eyes were still on the two young men. “I can arrange for protection and extra resources for them, but it might take a moment. In the meantime, I need to count on you to keep them safe.” He drew in a deep breath and lowered his head enough that looking toward the two agents was done through the hair of his brows. “I think I need to place a call a little ahead in time. Nine hundred years did he say?”

“Not that I know what you’re talking about, but yeah, about that.” She slapped him lightly on the arm and pointed to the top of the gardens. “Looks like the Gallifreyan Princess and her rather savage looking bodyguard are on their way down here.” She pulled her sodden hair from her cheek and tried rather unsuccessfully to push the short length of it over her shoulder. “What’re you going to tell them about Rose?”

“Quite possibly the truth,” he said under his breath.

“Well, that’s novel,” Bernice said with a light chuckle. “Are you sure you’re capable of it? Need a quick training course or something…?”

“Leela,” he boomed out with only a short stare at Bernice before flicking his full attention toward his friend. “How are you feeling?”

“I am not quire sure,” she admitted with a light frown creasing her brow. “Romana told me that I fell asleep in your office. That is very strange. I have never done that before.”

“You must have been exhausted,” he suggested with a warm smile. “But now that you’re rested, I have a small favour to ask of you.”

“I do not know that I want to do you any favours, Braxiatel,” she answered with as much humour as flat out denial in her voice. “When you ask me to do things, they are not always fun.”

“Dare I ask?” Bernice said with a laugh.

Leela gave her an emotionless glance, and while emotionless, it was by no means unfriendly. “You can ask, and I will tell you.”

“Yes,” Braxiatel said somewhat impatiently. “And the two of you can discuss the things I have asked of Leela, and Bernice, you can share with Leela some tales of your own.”

“I really don’t need your permission, Brax,” she drawled. 

“Indeed, but it might be my hope that by giving you my unconditional permission to do so, that it might dissuade you in some way,” he admitted with a light shrug. He then turned to Leela. “I can assure you, Leela, that this particular request will be something absolutely delightful to you.” He smiled widely. “In fact, I can say with certainty that you will – as the humans say – jump at the chance.”

“I am not so easy to charm, Braxiatel,” Leela said with a light sigh. “I will not fall for any of your tri--.”

“Burner Doctor,” he interrupted with a cheeky smile.

Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. “He is here?”

“He is,” Braxiatel confirmed. “And it is my understanding that he has encountered Rose, and taken her against her will.”

“I will kill him,” she growled low and dangerously. “I will cut him open, pull out his entrails and do a dance for my ancestors.”

“Oh,” Bernice said with a light laugh. “That’s an attitude I can get behind.”

Romana let out a gasp. “Brax! What is being done about this?” She looked around with worry. “If something happens to her, it will damage not only the timelines, but the Doctor and Brax, all of reality will come under fire.”

“Yes,” he drawled lightly. “Future me, of course.” He looked toward the fountain, where both James and Jason were still diligently scanning the area for Artron traces. Those two, they’re CIA. They’re conducting a search for them now.”

“How are the CIA here?” Romana asked curiously. She looked up at him. “Did you call; and they are here already?”

He shook his head. “No, Romana. I did not.” He looked to Leela. “Those two, they are to be protected at all costs. Kill anything that goes anywhere near either of them.”

“Now that’s better,” Bernice said with a smirk. “Much, _much_ better. Keep working at it, Brax, and you might just find you have an emotion or two to share.”

“Bernice, please.” He looked to Leela. “Can I count on you, Leela. Count on you to accompany them and keep them safe?”

“You wish for me to work with the CIA?” she queried with a tight frown. “But I do not work with them. I do not like the CIA. I will find the Burner on my own, and I will kill him.” She looked toward the two men. “And I will do it before they even begin to search.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t expect you to work with the CIA. I expect you … No. That’s not right.” He cleared his throat. “What I mean to say is that I am _asking_ you to work with Bernice and do what you can to keep the two of them safe.” He exhaled. “Leela. One of them is my _son_. The other is my _nephew_.” He heard Romana’s gasp at his side but chose to ignore it. “Both of them are here out of their time...”

“Well,” she said with a smile and a light shake in her head. “It would seem that your children will dance around time as you do, Braxiatel.”

“Indeed.”

“Then I shall protect them as I would my own,” she vowed. She looked toward Romana. “Will you come with me?”

Braxiatel shook his head. “I would prefer that Romana stay here with me.” He looked toward his future wife. “There were some revelations made that I wish to speak with you about. Privately.”

“I imagine so,” Romana said with a deep sigh. She looked toward Leela with apology. “I will have to miss this particular adventure, Leela. I hope that is okay.” She smiled toward Bernice. “Though I do hear that Professor Summerfield is as proficient with a weapon as you are.”

“We shall see about that,” Leela said with a beaming grin. She looked toward Bernice and held out a hand. “I am Leela, Warrior of the Sevateem. We will be hunting together today.”

“The Sevateem?” Bernice queried with wide eyes as she walked down along the grasses toward Jason and Jamie. “Oh, I’ve heard of them. Fascinating peoples with a very intriguing culture, a warrior race, yes?”

Braxiatel watched both Leela and Bernice walk away with an expression foretelling doom and gloom. “Romana….”

“Braxiatel,” she said softly, her hand on his arm. “I didn’t know about this, I promise you.”

“And I believe you,” he said softly. “I believe _them_. And that scares me.”

“You don’t scare easily,” she remarked softly. “What did they tell you?”

He took her hand and ran his thumb across her knuckles. “Something I won’t allow to come to pass,” he said firmly.

“You will not change the future,” she warned him. “You won’t do anything. You won’t warn your future. You won’t try and change any timeline at all, you hear me?”

He snorted out long through his nose. “I found out today that I was lucky enough to make you my wife; that every single dream, every fantasy I have ever had of a live with the woman my hearts beat for, has come true.” He waited for her sigh to finish. “And also, today, I find out that I lose the woman my hearts beat for. That I end up alone, without you.” He sniffed. “Elation and grief in one day.”

“They’re from Brax’s time,” Romana realised with a light gasp. “600 years ahead in my future.”

“Not even a thousand years from now.”

“We aren’t dead,” she assured him. “Rose, and I. We aren’t dead. Not now, and not 600 years from now.” She looked up at him. “Don’t you see? That’s why we’re here, Brax. To save _us_ , and to take us home to the men our hearts beat for.” She hooked her hair behind her ear. “I know that we don’t have a lot to go on, but what we do have is compelling, and a very good start in being able to find us.”

He looked down to her with a nod of his head. “Then take me to your capsule, Romana. Let me see what you have, and I’ll see what I can do to help.” He looked toward the foursome at the fountain, his brow creasing at a yelp of excitement from Jamie that they’d found something. “Although,” he remarked worriedly. “If they are unable to retrieve Thete’s mate today, we won’t need to look ahead toward tomorrow.”


	55. Burner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax and Romana start their search. Rose and the Burner get to know each other a little...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listening to the 100 top pop hits of the 80's was probably not the best soundtrack for today's chapter... Threw me off just slightly, but ... meh ... I needed some fun tunes to get me through today.
> 
> Gosh, the 80's had some fun music, didn't it? Much better than the song my son made me listen to today by some current hit maker (can't remember the name). My ears will never recover listening to a smug woman singing (if you can call it that) about having a hot, wet, [censored], and what the bloke can do with it. Like, really? That's what passes for hit music these days?? Yeah. Pass on that, ta. 
> 
> I always vowed I would never end up a boring mother hating the most current hits of the teens... but I became that... I became that real fast.... 
> 
> sighhhhhh..... So out of touch...
> 
> Not that it should need to be said, because it's quite clear I quite like Brax and Romana ... but the beginning is heavy with them, so heads up.
> 
> Anyway. Please enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

The expression on the face of Braxiatel when he stepped into the young travel capsule behind Romana was a heartbreaking one for her to witness. There was a true and palpable sense of heartbreak and longing, and she swore she could hear the stutter inside his hearts when he lifted his chin and closed his eyes to welcome the hum of the ship in his mind.

“How long has it been?” she asked him gently. “Since you’ve heard anyone or anything in your mind, Brax?”

“Too long, he breathed out sadly. “Far too long.” He finally opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling of the craft, then lowered his chin to look down to her. “Until you touched my mind today, it had been thirteen years of deathly silence.” He looked toward the console. “And before that, when Pandora took up residence inside my mind, a half century. Not exactly a quiet partner, I can assure you. Blithering fool who wouldn’t shut up for a moment. The silence that filled my mind when she was finally removed from my mind was blissful and very welcomed.” He pursed his lips. “For the first little while, anyway. I started to crave telepathic contact within a couple of months.”

“Thirteen years,” she breathed out sadly.

“Thirteen long years, Romana,” he agreed. He held off on remarking that once she was to depart the asteroid that his mind would go silent once more. It would upset her, and he couldn’t do that to her.

“I must have overwhelmed you,” she admitted with a light reddening in her cheeks. “I apologise for that.”

“None needed,” he said with a low chuckle. “None at all. If there was ever a way to fully relight the telepathic fires, that was certainly the way to do it.” His smile fell. “However, with warning. Should you wish to do that with me again, holding back on forming a rather premature bond with you _won’t_ be an option.”

“Noted,” she said with a quiet chuckle.

He clapped his hands together with a loud sound that echoed inside the cavernous room. “So. Let’s begin, shall we? I expect the sooner we can find the incarnations of yourselves that have broken the hearts of mine and my brother’s future selves, the better.”

“That’s a good idea,” she agreed with a light smile as she joined him beside the console. 

He watched her as she let her fingers fly over the keyboard to retrieve her data. “Might I ask you something, Romana?”

She exhaled a light sigh. “Ordinarily I would caution you against seeking information on your future, Brax, but as we have already revealed this much…”

“I will force myself to forget,” he vowed to her. 

“No, you won’t,” she disagreed with a light laugh. “It might end up something that I may force upon you myself.” She looked toward him with a somewhat suggestive glance. “If you would be so willing to allow me inside your mind once more.”

He looked at the monitor rather than toward her. There was a smile on his face. “I never want you out of there,” he admitted. He stepped up behind her, slipping his arms either side of her to press his palms down on the console top. His temple brushed against hers, eliciting a gasp and a shudder that he felt against his chest and belly. “Should losing my memories of today be the price I pay for the honour of sharing that level of love with you, Romana. It’s worth it.”

“Brax,” she breathed out with a wince on her face. “If we are to find those selves of us who are lost, then I must ask you not to stand in such close proximity.” She lifted her face to feel his breath against her cheek. “I don’t quite understand why it is, but your touch, both physical and telepathic has become an unreasonable craving of late. You are a need that I cannot reconcile in my mind.”

His hands shifted from the top of the console to curl around her womb. “This might have something to do with it,” he said with a chuckle against her cheek. “That, or I am simply so devastatingly appealing that you are unable to resist my enduring charms.”

The snort she gave at that was as unladylike and undistinguished as was possible for her. It allowed her the opportunity to shift him backward off her with a push of her back and shoulders. “You are, beyond all measure, a rather taxing individual to be around at times.”

“Part of my allure, I am sure,” he agreed with a light chuckle. He folded his arms across his chest to hold onto himself as Romana continued to pull the information they needed. His eyes traced along the swirling, circling glyphs on screen. After a moment, he clicked air through his teeth in a somewhat disappointed manner. “There really isn’t all that much to go on is there?”

“We pulled what we could from your capsule,” she said with a sigh. “And with you being as … ahhh, how should I put this, Brax? As _secretive_ as you are. There were a few security blocks I was unable to break through.”

“So, I am not aware of your movements right now?”

“Clearly not, if Rose’s conversation with your elder incarnation provided you with any sort of indication.” 

“Foolish,” he huffed. “Not to involve me in your hijinks.”

She shook her head. “You are somewhat overprotective right now…”

“With good reason.”

“With _adequate_ reason,” she amended with a look. “Unreasonable creature you can be at times, Rose and I felt it necessary to handle this on a level usually more appropriate for your own movements.”

“I see,” he drawled. “Leaving the both of you without adequate protections in place should your efforts go somewhat pear-shaped.” He let out a dramatic gasp. “Oh! Like they have.”

“Be wary,” she warned. “Leela is more than adequate protection, thank you.” She blew out a breath. “And while she still breathes, the situation is not nearly as pear-shaped as you are implying it is.”

“I do beg to differ.”

“We agree to disagree, then,” she said with a sigh. “As usual.”

He lifted a hand to rub at his jaw. “You pulled this from my capsule?”

“We did.” She exhaled a long breath. “Due to circumstances I won’t get into, I don’t currently have a capsule of my own. We share yours where necessary.”

He looked around the console room of their current capsule with a light pinch in his brow. “And this one’s not yours?”

“No,” she answered on a light rush of breath. “This one is currently non-symbiotically linked to a pilot.”

“And how are you piloting it?” His eyes slid to hers. “This is not a public transport capsule; it’s supposed to have a Time Lord linked to it or it won’t fly.”

“That is something I don’t wish to get into right at this moment,” she said with light warning in her tone. “But Rose does have a very close connection with Capsules, and this one did not question nor argue when she asked permission for flight.”

He scoffed. “She _asked_ the ship? Well. I’ve never heard of such nonsense before in my lives.”

“If it works,” she said with a smile. The smile faltered and she gave the slightest of shrugs. “So all I can tell you, Brax, is that the capsule that Rose and I were travelling in was intercepted in some disastrous way. The ship is still intact, and located on this asteroid of yours…”

“Then I would think our next steps are obvious, don’t you?”

She looked at him with question in her eye. “Not quite if I haven’t yet figured it out.”

He touched her face with his fingertips. “With so many things dancing inside that magnificent mind of yours, Romana. You can be forgiven for not exactly being on the top of your game right now.”

“Enough condescension, please,” she growled with obvious annoyance. “I’m not exactly in the mood to tolerate it right now.”

“No, I expect not,” he said with a sigh. With a determined movement he stepped in beside Romana to take over at the keyboard. “If this capsule is capable of providing precise temporal coordinates of the resting capsule, then we go to the capsule, don’t we?” he kept his eyes on the monitor. “Quite likely that capsule will have all of the answers you’re looking for.”

“We weren’t able to find a precise location,” she answered with a sigh. “The capsule is on emergency power only, and…”

“And there we are,” he boomed triumphantly. “On the opposite side of this giant floating rock to the Collection.”

She nudged him with her shoulder to push past him to look at the screen herself. “How did you…?”

He chuckled low. “Romana, my dear, the human game of Hide and Seek is a specialty of mine. I have never lost a game.”

“Yes,” she drawled. “When one does nothing but exist within lies and secrets, I would expect so.”

“Now,” he said without acknowledging her quiet accusation. “All I need to do is .. did you say _ask_ … the ship to take us there.” He looked at the console. “So how about it, dear? Would you like to take us toward your elder self?”

“Elder self?” she queried on a high voice. 

“Why yes, Romana,” he answered her with a pinch in his brow that suggested it was something she should have known. “A rather obvious first thought that I am quite sure you and Rose considered when you took this ship, I would guess.”

She exhaled a hard breath to display her frustration at him being so deliberately condescending. “Go on.”

“If your friend, Rose..”

“Your sister in law,” she reminded him. “Someone very deeply seared inside your hearts.”

“Yes,” he drawled. “In time I imagine she might have that effect on me.” His brows lifted. “Though I admit to being at somewhat of a loss to truly comprehend such feelings toward another.” He blinked. “But anyway. If she was capable of convincing this ship to cater to her whim, then it is safe to assume that he was willing to bond with her to allow flight…” he looked at her. “As I feel no bond between you and the ship”

“No,” she confirmed. “No bond on my end.”

He looked back at the monitor and leaned off to one side to flick up a switch and twist a dial almost clear across the console from where he stood. “Disappointing, that. As it means I have to get creative to allow the two of us to fly him.” His hands flew across the keyboard and his eyes were locked on the monitor ahead of him. The very tip of his tongue pressed into the very edge of his mouth as he concentrated on his task. After a moment he smirked, let out a hum of triumph. “Okay. Here we go.” He grit his teeth as he used all of his weight to be able to move a stubborn lever while furiously typing with the other hand on the keyboard. “This might be a very bumpy flight, Romana, do be warned.”

She gripped hard on the console as the rotor began to whine above them. “What are you doing?”

“Linking him to my ship to have her override his controls.” He smirked. “He’s only a young buck and is therefore no match against the might of my beautiful girl.” His teeth remained firmly together in a tight grit as the capsule shuddered, pitched, and shook. “And, we’re off. Please hold on to something, Romana, as I am unable to hold on to you and control this flight at the same time.”

“I’m … I’m fine,” she assured him with a hiss through her own teeth as she fought against the turbulence. “Just make it quick, please.”

Their materialisation was a heavy thud that propelled the both of them in a backward stumble from the console. Romana lost her balance but was quickly caught in one strong arm of Braxiatel. She gasped out a breath and looked up into his sparkling blue eyes. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” he assured her without lifting her from the light dip that he held her in. He licked at his lip and looked at hers. “It would be desperately inappropriate of me to kiss you right now, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” she agreed at her hands clutched around his lapels. “It definitely would be.” She tugged him down to her. “But for once, let me be inappropriate.”

“My Lady,” he purred as he lowered his lips to hers. “Your wish is my command.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Rose wasn’t really one for teleportation. It wasn’t something she was particularly accustomed to, and quite frankly, it felt really damn weird to her. 

Just when did her life become an episode of Star Trek?

Ahh, when she met the Doctor. Yes.

The Doctor that currently had his hands around her throat to try and choke her to death. Well, okay. Not this particular Doctor, but one rather similar to him.

“Stop,” she gurgled in a desperate, airless manner. “Please stop.”

Oddly, he did as she requested. With a dramatic sound from the back of his throat, he flicked both hands away from her throat in a wide and open armed gesture, and let her fall to her knees on the ground in front of him. She lightly touched at her throat with her fingertips as she coughed at the ground and tried to catch her breath.

“I …” she managed before a cough. “I can’t believe you actually let me go.”

“No. neither can I.” He sniffed at the air, his eyes closed as though doing an analysis of the air around him. he looked back toward her, his nose shifting in the wet and sodden heap she was on the ground. “However, there is something about you. Something … _unsusual_.” He shrugged and took a couple of steps away from her. “And I am intrigued.”

“Yeah, don’t be,” she warned. “In my experience the more unusual and intriguing someone is, the bigger of an arsehole they tend to be.”

He snorted with amusement. “And are you, _wife_? Are you an _arsehole_?”

She looked up at him through her brows. “Call me _wife_ one more time, and you’ll find out, yeah?”

“Oh how delightfully crass you are,” he said with a sigh. “How close to the bottom of the barrel did I have to get to in order to mate myself with you? Hmmm?”

“Pretty close to it,” she admitted quietly as she sat herself up to lean her back against the wall behind her. “I guess.” She lifted her knees and leaned her elbows on them to card her fingers through her hair. She drew in a breath as she took a look around at where they’d materialised.

The were in a cavern of sorts. A dark subterranean room in the very back of what Rose could only assume was a long tunnel. There was no natural lighting of any kind, and the air was very stale, so it was safe for her to assume that they were fairly deep inside whatever planet the Doctor had landed them on. She kept his movements in her peripheral as she took in as much as she could of the grey-rock walls of the cavern. She bit at her lip as she tried to contemplate a good point for escape…

“I wouldn’t think about trying to escape,” he warned her darkly. “This cavern sits at the centre of a network of tunnels that, really, would take a genius to accurately navigate through.” He strode toward a long plank of wood set atop columns of stacked boulders that he’d cobbled together into a table.

“What? You saying you’re a genius, then?”

“My darling girl,” he purred with obvious disdain. “I would have thought it was something that you already knew.” 

“Yeah. Right. If you say so.” She looked toward the table, which was filled with an array of dismantled electronics and housewares. None of it really seemed to be currently operational, mostly half cobbled together bits of nonsense. She drew in a deep breath and winced at the annoying tickle of airborne dust that put a metallic taste in the back of her throat. “So, where are we, anyway?”

“The same place we were when you were frolicking in the fountain,” he answered with a one-sided smirk. “Directly underneath, about fifteen hundred feet or so.” He twisted his head to look down his shoulder at her. “But don’t let that make you believe that our CIA agent son will be able to find you.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” she muttered. “If he’s anythin’ like his dad…”

“Even if he did try,” the Doctor cut in. “Even if he found the entrance to the tunnel systems here. Without intimate knowledge of the network, he’ll simply end up lost inside the network.” 

“You think a capsule can’t pull up a schematic?” she said with a sneer. 

He snorted. He smirked. He turned to face her. “Oh my dear, if it was only _that_ easy.” He walked toward the wall and gave it a firm pet with the flat of his hand. This asteroid is heavily contaminated with Quescuns and Scuqron, a mineral not unlike Galena on Earth, although not nearly as toxic. Very dense, with one of the highest number of electrons per…”

“I don’t need a science lesson, thanks,” Rose snarled.

“Well, that’s quite disappointing, he said with a long sigh. “How else am I going to explain to you how impossible it will be for our son to find us?”

She snarled at him as she lifted her hand to pat the wall behind her. “Lead. Not even Superman can see through it.” She dropped her arm and gave him a smile and a condescending tilt of her head. “Now. That was easy, yeah?”

His face fell. “Quite.”

She slumped into a slouch against the wall. “So? Tell me, _husband_ , what is it that you want to do with me?” She looked toward him. “Surely it isn’t to set up house with you?”

He scoffed out a laugh. “Oh, my good word, no. Absolutely not.” His nose wrinkled with distaste. “That would be torture to us both, dear. And I’m not all that masochistic that I would allow myself torture just to terrorise you. Perish the thought.”

She let out a long breath that held a light moan inside it. “Then why? What was your reason for kidnappin’ me instead of just disappearin’ yourself?”

“As I said, dear,” he began on a low voice. “You intrigue me.”

“Well, you do tend to get excited about humans, I guess.”

He barked out a sound of pure revulsion. “Oh, I think _not_ , young lady.” He waved a hand at her. “I gave up on that species several hundred years ago. Always so eager to get into trouble with complete and clear disregard for the safety of anyone else.” He lifted his nose in the air. “Wasted more than enough good regenerations coming to _their_ aid.”

He paused a moment, and then turned to face her. his expression shifted toward one of curiosity and question. “Why do you refer to yourself as a human?” He walked toward her, his hand on his chin with thought. “When you emit the telepathic signature of a Gallifreyan.”

Her eyes flared ever so slightly, a barely perceptible movement if one wasn’t watching too closely. “I … I dunno. I spent some time on Earth recently.” She swallowed, trying to come up with something halfway believable, or even somewhat reasonable. “Quite a bit of time, in fact. Guess I identified with the locals a little too much.”

“Really?” he asked flatly.

She flicked her hand up in a lazy gesture toward him. “Well. Not like you could stay on Gallifrey for any length of time, Doctor. Couldn’t stand the Time Lords and all, you. Couldn’t wait to get as far away from them as you could.”

His eyes narrowed and he made a slow and cautious approach of her. “That may well have been the case in my very early years. Back when I was young, and incredibly foolish.” He loomed over her with his hands on his hips and his head held high enough that his view of her was down along his nose. “But I grew up, _Dorothy_ , and realised that there really was no place at all like home.” He lifted a hand to look at his nails, and although he did attempt to force pride into his voice, he really spoke in a flat and disenchanted manner. “And with a new role – a higher _station_ of sorts - given to me by my Lady President, it only became a more _enticing_ place to be.”

“I’m sure it was,” she grumbled. “ _Familiar_ with her Lady President, are you?”

Her implication was obvious, and it made him stretch his lips into a smile. “Ahh, yes. I can see the influence of Earth on you if that is the first thought in your mind.” He drew in a long breath. “The Lady Romana and I are not on intimate grounds, dear girl. We never have been. I would not take a shrew like that into my chambers, nor into my mind.”

Rose’s brows lifted with that revelation. She always thought that the Doctor and Romana were such good friends, that it would span across decades, centuries, millennia, and even across dimensions. “I see,” she drawled long. “Something tells me, then, that you’re not being all that upfront about what really took you back to Gallifrey.”

“Perhaps because it is irrelevant,” he muttered as he lowered into a crouch in front of her. “You won’t be alive long enough for it to matter…” He took her jaw roughly in his hand to hold her face still. He looked deeply into her eyes, reaching deep inside her mind. “Not long enough for me to tell you the tale toward it’s finality at any rate.” He exhaled and narrowed his eyes to concentrate on reaching further into her mind through the amber within her eyes. “Now, to find out who and _what_ you really are.”

“You won’t get in there,” she snarled. “So don’t bother tryin’. I’ve got barriers set in place by the very best of them. The greatest telepathic mind in all of Prydon.”

“Thank you for the compliment, dear,” he said with a chuckle. “However, I am by no means the great…” his eyes widened and he let out a sharp yelp as he felt a white-hot whipcrack of pain inside his own mind and was propelled backward our of his crouch and onto his arse. “What in the name of Rassilon?”

“Oh,” Rose said with a laugh. “I’m sorry. Did you think I was talking about you, Doctor?”

He threw himself forward onto his hands and knees. One shaking hand lifted to point a finger at her. “What is Braxiatel doing inside your mind?” he growled. “I thought you were bonded to me?” He levered an arm to one side as though pointing outside. “We have a womb-born child together, that is an impossibility if we are not bonded in the rites of marriage.”

She grinned at him and wage him a waggle of her brow. “Well, you always were a bit of a renegade, weren’t you, Doctor?” she drew in a short series of clicks. “Flouting the rules, doing the impossible.” She shook her head. “Such a naughty, naughty boy.”

One of his hands curled around her neck, directly underneath her chin. He didn’t hold her tightly enough that he would actively choke her, but the grip was enough that it made her wince and hiss through her teeth at him. The anger in his eyes shifted toward analysis, and he let his eyes trail over her face; her eyes, the length of her nose, then the swell of her lips. He counted off the deep breaths she took as he looked her over.

Finally, after a long moment, his lips downturned into a frown and he shook his head. “I honestly can’t see the appeal in you,” he remarked flatly. “While, yes, there is something rather intriguing about the signature you emit, I find your physical presentation far too unremarkable to have you on my arm. Quite generic, really. Boring.”

“Well, if we’re trading physical appraisals, Doctor,” she sneered as best she could with the grip of his hand around her throat. “Care to hear my laundry list of nopes toward you as well?” She sniffed indignantly. “I’d shag Braxiatel _and_ Narvin before I’d get my kit off for _you_.”

“I dare suggest that you wouldn’t,” he countered with a smile. He leaned toward her, his lips against her ear. “Your heart, it beats for me.” He purred. “Thump-Thump. Thump-Thump. Each one of those beats belong to me.”

“No, they don’t,” she whispered in reply. “My heart belongs to the Doctor, _my_ Doctor, of _this_ universe.” She sucked in a breath through her teeth. “And his hearts beat for me.”

“I’m quite sure that they do,” he said with a grunt and he levered himself back from her and pushed himself up to a stand. “And very shortly they will stop beating at all.” He looked upward and smiled. “Oh, how very clever to consider.” He looked to her. “I can take your capsule, take his lives, return to the stars, the universe, all of time and space…”

“You wouldn’t.”

“What an exciting prospect,” he continued with a wide smile. 

“I won’t let you,” she growled hotly.

“Oh, like you can stop me,” he barked out incredulously. “Really. Now don’t be stupid, please.”

She inhaled deeply in through her nose and out through her mouth in a faster pace than her usual rhythm. “You call me stupid,” she snarled. “Do you really think you’re capable of it? Capable of killing yourself?”

“As easily as I did my own brother,” he stated with a light lift in one brow and a smirk on his face. At her horrified gasp, he smirked. “Oh yes, my dear. I killed the Irving Braxiatel in my world. A single shot from my weapon, and he was burned from existence.” His face hardened. “A little too easy, really, when I think about it. Such predictable movements, so easy to accost and take down. Absolutely no excitement in that kill at all.”

Rose lifted her chin and sniffed in deeply. “Well. You won’t get too much thrill from mine, either.” She drew in deepened breaths. “Because I won’t fight you, Doctor. If you want to end me, then do it.” She blinked slowly and her voice faltered toward a whisper. “If you feel that you have to.”

His eyes pinched just slightly at her sudden shift from defiance to defeat. “I am not entirely sure…”

“But know this,” she warned as a tear escaped her lashes and rolled down her cheek. “If you do anythin’ at all to me. Hurt me. Kill me. Then know this as fact.” She swallowed thickly and sat up as straight as she could. “My husband, the true Doctor of this dimension, and Brax … all, bloody 26 of them, they will come for you.”

“Will they now?”

“They will,” she confirmed bravely. “They will rip apart all of reality, this entire universe, to find you. And I promise you this: you won’t survive their wrath.” She pointed to her throat, where she knew she wore bruising from his grip. “And this…” she sighed. “This will be more than enough to put you in danger, right here and right now, without me even leavin’ this place.”

His shoulders lifted into a chuckle. “Oh, how positively darling are you. Do you honestly think that you have it in you to do anything of a retaliatory nature toward me: your husband, and the father of your child?”

“Children,” she corrected. “We have a couple, well, three apparently …” She looked at him wth a hardened, yet sorrowful glare. “And you are neither their father, nor my husband.”

“Still,” he said with a shrug. “Be that as it may with your false bravado in the face of an imminent demise. I don’t think you have it in you.”

“You’re probably right,” she agreed with a slow nod of her head and a sigh in her voice. “More of a mind to try and talk you out of your madness, really.” She lifted her eyes to a point over his shoulder. “Leela, however…” she looked back at his face. “Well, she has no reservations at all about killing you – or really anyone.” She smiled. “Right Leela?”

“I have no need to hesitate, Rose, and so I will not,” Leela replied with a scrape of her blades, one against the other, to screech the sound of metal upon metal throughout the cavern. “Oh, this _will_ be fun. A live prey and not a Zombie…”

“Well hey,” Bernice called from the darkness from beside where Leela snarled inside the shadows. “Don’t forget about me. Not one to book ahead, myself, but always ready to crash the party and have myself a strong bloody taste of the local delicacies as well, thanks.” Her eyes flicked to Leela when it finally registered in her mind what she had said. “Zombies? For real?” her brows lifted. “Now _that’s_ a story I want to hear.”

The Doctor spun hard on one foot to face the intruders who had found his years-long secret fortress of hiding and solitude. “Who? What?”

His eyes widened with horror at the vision he was graced with. Each member of the four person party finally stepped out of the shadows and into the artificial light of a small dome set upon the table. Two young men walked a cautious sideways gait, each with a staser gun held up with both hands to their shoulders, ready and locked on their target. Bernice stalked guardedly at their side, a firearm in one hand that was supported by the wrist of the other that held a large hunting knife. Beside her, Leela walked a tall and proud stride. Her head was held high, her knives held in each hand down past her hips. The rippling of her fingers on the hilt rolled the weapons enough to catch the light and glint dangerously through the dim room. Every step was one of confidence and challenge, unlike the cautious stride of her three teammates.

“You hurt my friend,” Leela noted with warning. “And so now you will die…” Her lip curled and one knife lifted high above her head. She let out a cry that echoed throughout the room and launched up high up into the air to swoop down onto her prey…

~~oooOOOooo~~


	56. The Other Side

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax and Romana find out just what led to Rose, Romana, and Narvin's disappearance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, didn't get quite as much done as I hoped I might....
> 
> Know you were expecting the Leela slaughter hour, but nope. Needed to explain just what actually got us all here in the first place.... 
> 
> That said: This is all Romana and Brax on a voyage of discovery...
> 
> I do hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

Romana and Braxiatel didn’t exactly leave the ship in a slow and relaxed manner. Both of them rushed out of the console room in such a rushed manner it was as though the both of them had received a firm slap on the backside and were told rather forcefully to get out.

Braxiatel turned in his rather stumbled walk outside to face the ship. There was a scowl on his face and a lift in his lip as he pointed toward the slamming doors.

“Well, I hardly think that was at all necessary,” he gruffed out with indignance. “You petulant child. You wait until I speak to your pilot about this. I assure you that she will be very upset with the way that you felt the need to manhandle an expectant lady.”

Romana put her hand on his arm. There was a smile of amusement on her face and a light glint in her eye. “Oh, Brax. Don’t get upset with him. We need him to get us back to the Collection after all.”

He turned on his heel, a sniff in his nose and a petulant expression of his own on his face. “Really. Did your friend _indeed_ have to choose a Type 60? Trouble. Nothing but trouble…”

“The personality of the capsule always matches that of their pilot, Brax,” she reminded him softly. “They choose each other.” A sad smile curled up the very edges of her lips. “That youngster lost his original pilot. So please give him a little leeway as he settles a new bond.”

Braxiatel frowned at that. “Lost his pilot already?” He dared not look at her. “That ship cannot have been out of the docks for any longer than a century. How did he lose his pilot so quickly?”

She let out a long breath. “There are some things that I’m not willing to share with you, Brax.”

“Ahh,” he breathed out knowingly. “Well, that _is_ concerning.”

“It shouldn’t be,” she warned him softly. “At least not right now.” She held her hair back against a hard breeze and looked around them. From what she could see, there was no sign of a capsule anywhere around them. “Are you quite sure that you’ve piloted us to the correct location?”

“Quite,” he answered firmly. He looked around the barren, rocky terrain that surrounded them. It was the exact opposite environment that was supported on the other side of the asteroid. Where the grounds that housed his collection were bright, lush, fertile, and vibrant, this side of the rock was dark and incredibly dreary. Thin, grey dust that wasn’t quite settled shifted around their boots with each step. They didn’t exactly leave foortprints in their wake, the unsettled dust moved quickly to cover off that potential.

“Was this how your asteroid was before you built your collection?” Romana asked softly. There was awe inside her voice at the thought that Braxiatel was gifted enough to have transformed such barren, rocky terrain into the majesty of what lay on its opposite side.

“No,” he answered with light disdain in his tone at the filthy landscape. “When I won this asteroid…”

“Hold on,” she said with a light bark of surprise in her tone as she stopped them both to put a hand on his arm in question. “You won this rock? How in the name of our founders…?”

“I am rather good at cards,” he answered with a light smirk. “As I am at _many_ things.”

“I don’t know that I want to hear what you wagered against this in your game.”

“Yes,” he drawled. “Best that not be discussed.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “But I knew the hand that I held was unbeatable – even by a cheat.” He smirked. 

“I expect you were as untrustworthy in the game as your competitor was.”

“I will admit to nothing of the sort,” he scoffed.

“Nor will you deny it,” she ventured with a shake in her head. “Really, Brax. Is there no end at all to your games?”

“Would I be any more appealing to you if there wasn’t?”

“Quite possibly no,” she admitted with a light smile. “Without your oftentimes untrustworthy and deviant ways, our lives would run along much different pathways.” She shifted her head to look toward him with a smile. “I most certainly not be who I am without it.”

“Oh, I am quite sure you would have excelled with or without me, Romana.”

“I’ve seen that life, Braxiatel,” she said with a sigh. “Who I would become without you and the Doctor in my lives. I didn’t like it. Not one bit.” She let out another breath. “And the proof of your influence on my life, and who I am _because_ of you, was presented to you quite brilliantly during our journeys through the Axis, wasn’t it?” She inhaled. “A defeated wife and mother, with no future… until _you_.”

“Romana…”

“I need for you to hold my hand, put your hand upon my lower back, and guide me in the right path.” She bit at her lip and looked down to the ground. “I _am_ – because of _you_.”

“You _are_ , because of _you_ ,” he corrected her. “It has simply been my pleasure to be part of that journey. To watch you evolve and blossom from a dedicated and brilliant student of time to the Lady President of time and all of her dominions.” He put his hand on her lower back, his thumb grazing lightly across her spine. “I had very little to do with that.”

“You are not my tutor now,” she warned him softly. ‘I don’t need your encouragement.” She closed her eyes and enjoyed the touch of his hand on her back. “But I do need _you_.”

“And you have me,” he assured her. His hand shifted on her back to clutch at the fabric of her long robe-like dress. “Wait a moment,” he breathed against her ear as he shifted to step around and ahead of her. “I think we may have found him.”

She blinked through the shadows ahead of them and looked forward with a light pinch in her brow. All that she could see were craggy rocks and boulders ahead of them. There was nothing to suggest that a Time Capsule was lurking silently ahead of them. For a reason she couldn’t quite explain, she lowered her voice to a low whisper. “Where? I can’t see it?”

He hummed with light amusement. “Which is rather the purpose of a Chameleon Circuit, isn’t it?” he said with a wink and a chuckle. “You’re not supposed to see it.”

She let out a sigh and lifted her head to the stars in the skies above them. “Yes. Of course.”

He strode toward a tall pillar of dark grey rock seated in a crag beside a high cliff and slapped hard at the crumbling, dusty rock at its side. “Well? Come on, open up.”

Romana stepped up beside him. There was a curious tilt in her head as she watched the dust and small fragments of rock fall where his hand struck the pillar. “Are you quite sure, Braxiatel? This really doesn’t appear to be anything except a crumbling piece of rock.”

A male voice, quiet and filled with static. “Confirm identity: _Lord Chancellor_ _Irving Braxiatel_. Access: _Granted_.”

His brows were high on his forehead when he looked to Romana with question. “Well. Isn’t that handy? At what juncture in time do the capsules learn to speak?”

She watched a thin line of light appear down along the centre of the pillar. “I don’t know that it’s an ability to speak more than it is a security recording.” She took a short step backward as the line of light expanded with an inward opening of the capsule doors. There was no hiss of steam, or a strong resounding thrum of expectation of flight as she would have expected. Instead the doors opened to reveal an expansive console room lit only by the dimmed light of the rotor column. She looked toward Braxiatel, who stood completely still at the threshold of the ship His breath had ceased to be drawn and his eyes were wide.

“Brax?” she questioned worriedly. “Are you alright?”

“My mind,” he managed on a strangled breath. “Its alive.” His brows pulled together. “I can hear his song in my head, and I shouldn’t be able to. Not like this.”

“He’s a lonely boy,” Romana offered. “Much like you, I suspect. Desperate for connection.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s deeper than that, Romana.” He managed to break from his stand and strode forward into the ship. “A bond. It feels … well ...almost _familial_ , I dare say, rather than symbiotic.” Lights above him started to come on with a thump and a click. As he strode forward, the lighting followed along to create a lit pathway for him to take toward the console. He tilted his chin curiously, to look upward and forward as he walked. He rubbed at his jaw. “Quite curious. Particularly considering his attitude to me in his younger form.”

Romana looked up and around the console room herself. Much different in theme to the ship they have both just flown in. This one had a warmth and welcomness to it that the younger ship lacked. His hum was closer to a warm embrace than it was the smack on the bottom she’d just received.

“I guess Rose kept this capsule as her bond-mate after all,” she said in little more than a whisper. “The TARDIS mustn’t have been too happy with that.”

“Well,” Braxiatel purred out with humour as he approached the console. “That all depends, doesn’t it? The TARDIS is female, and the handsome young buck Rose brought home with her _is_ male…”

“Quite an age differential,” Romana said with a chuckle.

“More than six hundred years between us,” he remarked. “Do be wary of showing any form of disdain toward an age-gap, thank you.” He pursed his lips and looked down at the console, which was free of dials, buttons and levers. A humph of curiosity hummed in the back of his throat. “Unusual.”

“What is unusual?” Romana asked as she stopped her walking twirl of analysis and stepped to his side.

“No controls to speak of,” he remarked. “I suspect the ship is flown telepathically – not unheard of with the more expensive-end current models – although hasn’t proven to be particularly effective.” He exhaled. “And it certainly puts us in a rather difficult position.”

“We aren’t trying to pilot it,” Romana suggested. “Only seek out information about what happened to his crew.”

“With no definable control panel, I can’t see how we would be able to do even that,” he said with a downward turn of his lips. He walked around the barren console with a brush of his fingertips along the surface. “How to command it to provide the answers we seek?”

Romana stood just slightly off the console. Her arm crossed along her belly so that she could cup her chin in her hand. “Perhaps we can ask…?”

His eyes flicked to hers. “Ask?” he said flatly. “Oh yes, of course. As in…” he drew n a deep breath and put on his most authoritative voice. “Capsule, please display the data recording of the final half hour of your last flight.”

Before he could look toward Romana with an expression of indignance and, a scratchy male voice spoke form the rotor column. “Identify: Lord Chancellor Irving Braxiatel. Request for flight data granted…”

His eyes flashed wide, but Braxiatel only managed to utter a grunt of surprise before he was spun on his feet by the light of a series of holographic projectors slowly pixelating images to life around the console. He staggered backward in surprise toward Romana.

“Well, I must say,” he remarked with almost worried eyes. “This is quite new, isn’t it?”

“Almost a millennium ahead of where you are right now,” she reminded him gently with a light touch of both of her hands against his arm and chest. She stepped in close to his side. “There are bound to be advancements…”

“Not on an aged capsule,” he disagreed gently with a lift of his arm to press his hand onto her back to keep her close to him. “They’d issue a new one before completely outfitting it with new tech.”

“You’ve never given up your capsule,” she said with a smile. “And she’s constantly upgraded.”

“Yes. Well. I am not sure I like this upgrade,” he said with a huff as the images of three people continued to slowly build up around the console ahead of them. “Less physical control of the flight.”

“Less stroking and petting the console, you mean?” she said with a slow shift of her eyes toward him. There was a lift in her brow and a light pucker in her lips.

“I’m really not quite sure just what you are implying, Romana.” He cleared his throat and lowered his chin to look up at the console as the image flickered and flashed. “You can explain later. Right now, let’s see what this old boy has to tell us.”

The images flickered and shimmered, sometimes pixelating somewhat, as the figures hung on tightly to a console as the ship pitched violently one way to another. Their voices, and the urgent thrumming chime of the cloisters was rough with static. Two women stood either side of the console, both of them staring toward each other with expressions and features alight with panic. On the floor and off to the side, a figure lay on its side, its face and hands glowing hot with the fires of regeneration.

_“Tell me we can break free of this, Rose,” one of the women ordered urgently. “And this time permanently if you don’t mind.”_

_Rose’s eyes were closed and her hands clutched a white-knuckled grip of the console edge. “I’m doing my best, Romana, but whatever’s got us doesn’t want to let go.” She grit her teeth together and hissed out a sound of exertion. “But it’s strong, too strong for me to fight it.” She panted. “It’s killing my head.”_

_Romana poked her finger into a holographic monitor above the console. She flicked it to one side, then to the other, rifling through data and discarding anything she didn’t think pertinent. “It might help if Narvin would finish regenerating and get up to help.”_

_“Might’ve helped more if he didn’t get himself into enough grief to regenerate in the first place,” Rose growled, her eyes still closed tightly in concentration. “Like, what was he thinking offering himself up like that?”_

_“Let’s perform a post-mortem of Narvin’s actions later,” Romana remarked with a hard sigh._

_“Appropriate, given the situation.”_

_Romana rolled her eyes then looked to Rose in warning. “We have bigger things to worry about right now – such as the temporal lasso that’s got your capsule.” She curled a lip and continued to flick through the data on the monitor. “How much energy has your capsule got left? Can he continue to fight against this?”_

_“Better question is_ my _energy level,” Rose said through her teeth. “I’ve never had to link this long before. I don’t know how much I have left in me.” The console stopped shaking, and Rose’s eyes flashed open wide. She panted out a series of hard breaths that had her gasping over a dry tongue. “I … I think we’ve lost them. But I don’t know for how long.”_

_Romana straightened her back and relaxed the tight lock of her body over the console. “Thank Omega,” she breathed out as she ran her palm over her sweated forehead. “Whilst usually I do enjoy flight in this capsule, I do have to say today is not so pleasant.”_

_“Yeah, for good reason, though, not because I’m a terrible pilot,” Rose huffed. “Have any luck getting through to Gallifrey?”_

_Romana shook her head slowly. “Unfortunately, no. It would seem that the temporal lasso that captured the capsule shut down many of the functions of the Interstitial Antenna. We can receive incoming alerts and communications, but are unable to send anything out.”_

_“Did you try the Telegraph? I know it’s outdated, but at least it can patch us through to Traffic Control to get a message to Brax and Thete.”_

_“Honestly,” she said along an exhale. “I’d much rather the two of them don’t find out about this, thank you, Rose.” She drew in a breath and winced. “Brax warned me to take an escort, and I refused.”_

_“Yeah, this isn’t something he’s going to let you live down any time soon. What’s the bet he already has an_ I told you so _speech already written in his head.”_

_Both women looked to the side at a groan and a set of fingers curling around the edge of the console._

_“Oh, look who’s decided to join us,” Rose drawled. “Now that the worst of it is over, maybe you can get up and give us a hand with trying to reach Gallifrey?”_

_A female head drew up slowly over the edge of the console, her expression tired and drawn. “Do you think you can give me a moment to get my bearings?” she asked in a slightly rough voice that was struggling to properly vocalise. She winced and held at her throat. “Oh? Female again?”_

_“Okay, so now my Charlie’s Angels joke stands, yeah?” Rose said with a chuckle._

_Narvin levered her with a lightly annoyed stare as she walked around the console. It was clear that her Uniform was tighter now than was comfortable by the way she picked and pulled at the fabric across her chest and at her crotch. “What’re we dealing with, anyway?”_

_Romana tried her best not to watch the way Narvin was so blatantly adjusting her clothing, and instead drew in a breath and looked ahead at the monitor. “We’ve lost outgoing communication ability, cannot perform outside scanning, and weapons are gone. The Absolute Tesseractulator is giving system-wide errors including the Mean Free Path tracker and the Time Path Indicator.”_

_“Interstitial Antenna out?” she questioned flatly. She tugged at the front of her shirt and curled her lip as she rolled her shoulders. “Might be a Control Sphere issue and you’ve lost calibration.”_

_“Wish it were that simple,” Rose offered. “We’ve been in a fight for control of the ship for the last three and a half hours.”_

_Narvin shot her a look. “For what reason?”_

_“We were caught in what looks to be Ghaestreix control beam,” Romana offered with a gesture toward a blinking mauve glyph on the monitor. “Rose has been battling to get us out of their net…”_

_Narvin let out a long moan and shook her head. “And she’s going to have to keep fighting, Romana, because they aren’t going to give up.” She raked her fingernails through her hair. “How did they know about this flight? How did they know you weren’t on Gallifrey?”_

_Rose looked between the two Time Ladies with an expression to suggest she needed to have a little more explanation as to just who these Ghaestreix characters were. She dipped her head expectantly. “Well? Are you gonna fill me in on who these people are?”_

_Romana let out a sigh and looked toward her. “I was hoping that we’d be able to get far enough away from them that explanation might not be necessary.” She drew in a breath. “But the Ghaestreix are a species of peoples who …” She winced. “Well, their opinion on Time Lords is negative to say the very least particularly after….”_

The feed crackled to the point of being completely indecipherable. Braxiatel frowned with displeasure. He shifted to move forward, but was held back by Romana.

“Brax, don’t,” she cautioned him gently.

“I have to do something to clean up the data feed,” he stated firmly. “We’re missing some rather valuable information here…”

“No,” she corrected him firmly. “You are being saved from details of your future that you don’t need to know.”

“Don’t need to know?” He shook his head. “I disagree.” He gestured toward the static filled and jumbled feed ahead of them. “Romana, the Ghaestreix are not the enemy of the Time Lords. They are an ally.”

“Not any more,” she said softly. 

His eyes flashed wide. “What do you mean?” He looked toward the holograms and then back to her. “Romana,” his voice was clearly filled with worry. “The Ghaestreix are a dangerous, deadly species of people. We fought, wheeled, dealed, and made many sacrifices to stay on their good side for centuries, because we knew the consequences of becoming an enemy.”

She closed her eyes and nodded slowly. “I know.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t tell you,” she said softly, her face creasing to a wince. “As I said to you, Irving. There are things I simply cannot share with you.” She looked toward him with pleading in her yes. “Please, don’t push this. I implore you.”

His expression softened and a light sound that was close to a whimper rolled in the back of his throat. “Your wish,” he half whimpered. “Romana. Your wish is always my command, but if your wish will put you in danger, I can’t.”

“I think,” she said with her eyes shifting to the hologram. “I was already in danger, Brax.” She looked back to him. “We’re in the aftermath right now, saving us from danger. How it came to pass, it doesn’t matter. Please trust me.”

“If it looks to matter, Romana…” There was warning in his voice that meant he didn’t have to finish that question.

“If it matters, Brax, then I will tell you,” she said with a nod of her head. “But right now, I won’t. I will ask you to respect that.”

He nodded with a hard exhale. “Then what I need to know is that the Ghaestreix are now our enemy – or at least are an enemy in your timeline. This means you three are in horrific danger, and escape … I’m afraid that without drastic measures, it will be impossible.”

The both looked back to the hologram as the jumbled words and discussion shifted and morphed back to something understandable with a whir and a moan.

_Rose looked stunned at the revelation. “So these Ghaestreix, they’re pretty tenacious, yeah?”_

_Narvin grit her teeth and nodded. “They make Leela look like a disinterested huntress.” She looked to Romana. “Rose and I need to get you back to Gallifrey by any means possible.” She tugged at her sleeve. “Take my time Ring, get yourself clear.”_

_“And leave the two of you here to be taken,” Romana growled. “I will do no such thing.”_

_“You don’t really have a choice,” Rose offered with a waver in her voice. “You’re the Lady President of Gallifrey, you need to be protected at all costs.” She swallowed. “Even at the cost of the two of us.”_

_“No!” she snarled. “I won’t do it. I am tired of losing those who are in my hearts because of this_ I am President and need to be protected at all costs _woprat excrement.” She pointed toward Narvin. “Put that Time Ring away and think of something else. Something better.” She huffed. “You’re CIA, surely you know of some sly and devious methods of escape.”_

_She drew her hands down her face, drawing down the skin under her eyes to unnaturally widen them. “We shouldn’t have come without escort,” she moaned. “At least we could have notified Gallifrey and pulled in the Chancellery Guard capsules. Brax is going to slay me when we get back.”_

_Rose gave a small smile. “Small price to pay for escape, yeah?” She sniffed. “Means we get away from the bad guys, right?”_

_“Chances are slim,” Narvin said with a grunt. She used her shoulder to push past Romana to take centre position at the monitor and lifted her hand to flick through information on the holoscreen. “Where are we?”_

_“Not in the vortex anymore,” Rose answered with a light wince. “So we’re kind’ve floating right now. We couldn’t keep the flight stabilised with the damage sustained during the initial contact. Whatever they hit us with took out half our systems.”_

_Narvin nodded. “No need to apologise, Rose. You did your best, I’ve no doubt about that.”_

_“Survival instinct and all that,” she said with a shrug._

_“Instinct to save, not necessarily survive,” Narvin corrected almost distractedly. She narrowed her eyes at the monitor and creased her face. “Gamatra Sector. No known allies there.”_

_“KS-159,” Romana breathed out carefully._

_“Yes,” Narvin replied around the hand she held over her chin as she continued to scan the mapping on the screen. “That’s an asteroid about 100 miles from our current location.” She flicked her eyes to Romana, whose own eyes were reddening. “Romana?” she asked worriedly. “What’s wrong?”_

_Romana looked toward Rose with a tightening in her face and sadness in her breath. “Rose,” she said with genuine heartbreak. “This is it.” She swallowed. “KS-159…”_

_Rose’s expression shifted toward understanding. “The Braxiatel Collection.” Her face tightened up and she shook her head. “No, Romana. No. That can’t be now. It can’t!”_

_“I’m afraid it is.” She looked around the console. “It’s making sense now, why we did what we had to.”_

_Rose’s head continued to move side to side. “Please, Romana. We can’t. We can’t do it to them. There has to be another way. Time can be rewritten, yeah?” She gulped. “ And. And we can’t, yeah? You can’t. You didn’t leave Gallifrey on good terms with Brax – he was mad, you were fighting.”_

_“I’m sorry, Rose.”_

_“This’ll kill him, Romana,” she pleaded softly. “Don’t do this to him.”_

_“Don’t think this isn’t breaking my hearts, Rose,” she half snapped in reply. “Because it is. I remember how he was; how broken his hearts were. I remember it all.” She gulped. “And so should you.”_

_“Which is the problem,” Rose argued. “Because I saw how torn he was. Now you’re saying that we have to do this to them? To our mates, to our children?”_

_“It’s do this, Rose, or we die,” she stated flatly. “Which is worse for them? A decade apart, or never seeing us again.”_

_Narvin looked between the two of them with confusion written on her face. “Okay. I am definitely out of the loop here. Care to update me somewhat so I’m caught up?”_

_“We know a way out of this,” Romana said firmly. She straightened her back to put herself at her full height. “Rose, pilot us to KS-159, materialise on the underside of the asteroid, and prepare to shut down to emergency systems only.”_

_“Romana, please?” she pleaded._

_“As your President,” she growled. “I’m ordering you to do as I ask. Best you get us there as quickly as possible. The Ghaestreix ship will find us, of this I have no doubt at all. So the sooner we are within the gravitational pull of that planetoid, the better.”_

_“Yes, my lady,” Rose replied sadly. “As you command.”_

_“And prepare the Chameleon Arch for immediate deployment – all passengers,” she said firmly with a look toward Narvin. “We need to hide, and we need to hide in a way that makes us undetectable.” She swallowed. “Even to our own people.”_

_“Oh no,” Narvin argued with a shake in her head. “No, Romana. I refuse. I absolutely refuse.”_

_“You really do have no choice,” she said in reply, her eyes narrowing with challenge. “I am your President. When I_ ask _you to do something, I’m only being polite. You do not have a choice in the matter.”_

_“Yes, Madam President,” Narvin replied through a light curl in her lip. “Although let it be noted that I am expressing my objections to this plan.” She sniffed. “My very vehement objections.”_

_“Noted,” Romana replied. She walked toward Rose and set her hand on her shoulder. There was a weak smile on her face as she let her hand slide across to rest on her shoulders. “We’ll be home soon, Rose. Remember that.”_

_“Yeah. Just a vacation with the girls,” she breathed out as she tilted her head to rest temple-to-temple with Romana. One last bit of telepathic connection before their minds turned silent for the next decade. “Home before we even realise we’re gone.”_

_The all looked upward as three helmets lowered down from the ceiling. Romana held on to hers and looked to Rose. “I think I might want to be an archaeologist, what do you think? I’ve always wanted to do something like that…”_

The feed collapsed on itself to come to an abrupt end. For that, Braxiatel was thankful. While he had never used the Chameleon Arch at all on himself, he had seen it in use and seen just how incredibly painful the transition was.

…Regeneration was a piece of cake by comparison.

He closed his eyes to try and shake free the mental image of Romana screaming in agony in the middle of the console room, less than ten feet away from where he was standing. He drew in a long breath and turned around to put his back to the console.

Romana touched her hands to his waist and stroked her hands soothingly forward and back. “Do you recognise any of them?”

“Yeah,’ he breathed out wetly. He lifted his head and winced as he looked upward. “Yes, I do.”

“And?” she asked hopefully. “Are they here?”

“Narvin is,” he replied with a light smile. “As for yourself and Rose. You’re both due back to the Collection tomorrow from a dig – at the request of Bernice.”

“So we are safe, then,” she said with relief. “Safe, and _alive_.”

“Very much so,” he confirmed with a smile, a smile that faltered somewhat with the dawning realisation that for the past ten years he’d suffered pain and loneliness, and yet his friends – the woman he sacrificed it all for, and would sacrifice it all again for – was right there. The whole time, she was right within his arm’s reach. He closed his eyes over that revelation. “You and Rose are two of my very best Archaeologists, actually. Not quite sure I’ll be so willing to hand them back to you.”

“And Narvin?” she queried. “Is he – or she, now – Are they safe as well?”

Braxiatel broke into a smile at that. “You didn’t recognise her, Romana?”

Romana’s shoulders lifted. Quite honestly she hadn’t taken too much notice of the people that milled around the Collection. She shook her head and offered him a rather sheepish expression. “I’m sorry, Brax. No.”

“Well. Shame that, because it will become fodder for our unending amusement for centuries to come, my dear.” He chuckled. “And I am very glad that I will be here to see her reaction when she regains her Time Lady Physiology. I am quite sure her utter abhorrence will be a magical sight to behold.”

Romana’s eyes pinched just slightly. “Oh-kay? And who is she? Bernice?”

His expression fell “Why no. That would actually be devastating to me. Thank Rassilon that wasn’t the case.”

“Then who?”

Braxiatel stretched a smile across his face. “Narvin is Diana,” he answered. “My personal assistant.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	57. Underground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leela goes after her pray

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ehm .... What to say about this one? Ehm ... it took a kind've winding road I didn't expect it to take.... But I did finally get to where I wanted to get to.... Let's call it the scenic route, shall we?
> 
> I really hope that you enjoy this one. See you next week.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Leela’s loud warrior cry, a sound of both song and warning, swirled and bounced off the jagged rock walls. The echoes served to heighten, amplify and duplicate of the sound howling through snarled, teeth baring lips. If he hadn’t seen her in the air in front of him, the Doctor could have been forgiven for thinking he was faced with an entire army of Sevateem Warriors, rather than just the one…

…Although one was more than dangerous enough.

There was a word inside Leela’s cry. A single word that promised not only her intention, but also the inevitability of her strike. A single syllable to drive terror deep into his soul. “Die” It was clear, very clear, that he wouldn’t survive this encounter with any one of his hearts left beating.

He braced down into a low crouch and held one forearm up into the air as a shield against her. “Do you really think I’m that easy to kill, Leela?” he yelled out in a voice that was a mix between anger and victory. It ended with a laugh as a bright blue light enveloped his crouched form and he disappeared into nothing, only his laugh remaining to echo out loud enough to engulf and overtake Leela’s cry.

Her blades came down hard on the rocky floor, driving deeply into the winding vein of soft metal mineral to within an inch of the hilt. Leela released the blades to dive into a roll over her shoulder that slid her across the dust and dirt to finally come to a stop in a crouch in front of her intended target. She sneered a low growl to find that rather being buried in the hearts of a murderer, her blades stood tall in the ground instead.

“Where did he go?” she growled with a large measure of surprise in her voice. Her eyes were flared in fury and shifted from the leather-wrapped handle of her knives toward the stunned looking pair of CIA agents still staring along the barrels of their stasers. “This is not what happens when a Time Lord is at the end of my blades. They do not vanish like this.”

Jason lowered his weapon, raised it, then lowered it again. He let out a long huff before drawing in a deeper breath through his nose. “Artron,” he noted darkly. “Damn coward transmatted himself out of here.”

Bernice dropped her gun and slowly slid her hunting knife into the holster at her thigh. The slow shift of her head was a cautious look around them. “I thought the two of you said there was no way of being able to get past the lead in the walls…”

“Well quite plainly it’s possible,” Jason growled. He gestured toward Rose, whose eyes were wide and locked on the last position of the Doctor. “He got the two of them in here, didn’t he? And let’s not forget he _zapped_ himself out as well.”

She lifted a brow at him. It was an expression of disappointment mixed with challenge. “The CIA not up to date with their technology?” she drolled flatly. “Can’t manage to work a fix against something as simple as lead…?”

“Oh shut up,” he snarled.

“No, really,” she continued on as she holstered her gun in the back waistband of her trousers. “The self-proclaimed leading experts in the most advanced technology in the entire bloody universe, and you’re stymied by a little bit of lead?”

‘Really, Professor Summerfield,” Jason growled. “Drop it.”

“Very disappointing, so no. I don’t think I _will_ drop it,” she said with a defiant tic of her head. “Might be good to work on it, yeah?” She strode toward Leela, still in a crouch on the ground and staring at her blades in the rock. “Staring at it isn’t going to make him reappear, Leela.”

“I am very tired of all of this Time Lord trickery,” she seethed through her teeth. “Cowards that do not wish to stand and fight.”

Bernice sniffed an indignant sound through her nose. “Only just figuring that out, are you?”

“I have known this for a long time,” she answered with an annoyed sigh as she rose slowly to her feet. “Hot air and threats, that is all they are.”

“That pretty much sums up most blokes,” Bernice offered with a shrug. She paused a moment to wait for the inevitable “Oi!” that should have come from at least one of the two males in the cavern. She was surprised when it didn’t come, and so her voice was a little on the shocked and squeaky side. “Current males included I suppose.”

“No,” Jamie offered gruffly. “But didn’t feel it entirely necessary to dignify that remark with one of my own.”

Bernice spun slowly on the ball of her foot and gave him a smile. “And yet, you did…”

He gave her an annoyed look, then looked down at the blinking device in his hand. “I’ll go do a quick scan and see what – if anything – I can trace him with.”

Bernice pursed his lips to let him walk to the mouth of the cavern. She purposely waited for him to walk blindly forward with his nose down on the blinking light of his contraption, then made a sound in the back of her throat to get his attention. “This is probably the point where I should remind you that without someone to guide you, you’re going to get lost in there.” She rubbed at her nose with the crook of her finger. “And I’ve got plans immediately following getting Rose out of here, so….”

Jamie skidded to an abrupt stop at the entrance and let out a long moan. “Probably should have mapped our pathway…”

It was a statement spoken to himself rather than to anyone else, but Bernice leapt upon it with a shrug and a smile. “Should have, could have, would have, but you didn’t. So best you stay put.”

Leela wore a light smile at that as she pulled her blades from the ground. It took a firm tug, and she grunted as she did so. “Are you unharmed?” she asked Rose, still seated on the ground against the wall.

Rose’s hand was in her hair, her knees pulled up to her chest, so she looked at Leela around her wrist. “Physically, or emotionally?” she questioned softly. “Because my answer really does depend on that.”

Leela pocketed both blades and walked toward her, dipping into a crouch at Rose’s side. She cupped Rose’s chin in her hand and hummed out a sound as she rather roughly shifted her head from side to side to look for injury.

“You have bruising,” she stated after a moment. “But I see no other injury.”

“Look deeper,” Rose whispered with a look into Leela’s eyes. 

Leela did lower her head a little, and narrowed her gaze to attempt to look deeper. She hummed lightly. “Your spirit aches. This I can see.” She took her focus from deep within Rose’s gaze to shift her eyes between Rose’s. “But do remember, Rose. This man, he is not the Doctor of our universe. He is an imposter.”

“He’s still the Doctor,” Rose said with a sigh.

“No, he is not.”

“Leela’s right, Jason offered flatly. “This man isn’t the one who I’ve grown up with.” His face turned up in a since of disgust. “Poor fashion choices aside, of course.”

Rose pulled her knees up a little tighter to her chest. “And who are you?” she queried softly.

He offered her a light bow of respect and greeting. “Jasondrurathusamia of the House of Braxiatel,” he answered with a smile. “Otherwise known as Jason, or Jase…”

“Or _woprat_ ,” James offered with a light smirk as he strode toward the rustic lab-bench.

Jason gave him a light glare but looked back toward Rose. “And this joker, he’s Jamesthinducapiro of the House of Sigma. Otherwise known as James, or Jamie.” He paused only long enough for James to give a tip of his fingers to his brow in a lazy salute of greeting, then smiled gently toward Rose. “Or _Baby_ , as you prefer to call him.”

“My son,” Rose noted with a smile. “Yes, I can see your father in you.” She looked to Jason and tilted her head to one side. “You’re Brax and Romana’s son, but I can’t see the same resemblance in you.”

“I’ve already regenerated for the first time,” he said with a shrug. He thumbed over his shoulder to James. “He doesn’t let himself get into enough mischief to have that happen to him yet…”

“Or I’m just better at escape than you are,” James remarked distractedly as he scanned over the table with his eyes, and with his scanning device. He let out a thoughtful humming sound. “Well. This is interesting, isn’t it?”

“More interesting than having your mum here?” Jason muttered low. He walked toward Rose and held out his hand to help her to her feet. “Forgive Jamie and his apparent lack of care toward your wellbeing, but he’s got a bit of a one-track mind when he sees things worth tinkering with.”

Rose took Jason’s hand and grunted as she used his hold as leverage to get up to his feet. “Nah, it’s okay,” she breathed out. “I get it. His Dad’s the same.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said with a smile as Rose took a moment to brush herself down of dirt – an impossible task on wet clothing. “Now, Jamie might not be looking for one, but I kind’ve am.”

She lifted eyes widened with question. “Looking for what?”

“A cuddle,” he answered breathily. “It’s been too long, Tonzarina, it really has.”

She waggled the fingers of both hands to him with invitation and lifted her arms to welcome him in. “Well, come on, then.”

Jason practically dove as he dipped his legs, moved forward, and wrapped his arms around Rose’s waist. He made a growl of a sound in the back of his throat when he straightened his legs, arched his back, and lifted her from the ground. He twirled in place to walk them both in a circle toward the work-bench and toward Jamie. “Oh yeah, this is what it’s all about!” He held Rose against his chest, her toes still off the ground. He leaned back on the bench and looked to his cousin.

“Your turn,” he said with a smile.

Jamie shifted his head, but not really his eyes. “Not now, Jase.”

“Jamie…”

“I said not right now,” he repeated through his teeth. 

“It’s okay,” Rose said with a squirm for freedom from Jason’s strong hold. “He’s right. More important things to do than cuddlin’ right now.”

Leela humphed in agreement with her. “That is true, Rose. We have many things that we need to do. Hugging can some when we are all safe, and our prey has been caught.”

Bernice had her brows seated high as she peeled off the wall to approach the attractive youngster locked on the items on the tabletop. “What’s got your attention, anyway? Anything interesting?”

He didn’t look at her, but he held up a chunk of jagged, blood-red rock to her. “Scrods Crystal,” he said absently. “From the Ster’uds constellation. Ancient material, fossilised … ehm … Well, best you don’t know.”

Bernice took the rock in her hand and looked it over with her brows high with interest. She pulled a flashlight from her pocket and held the rock with her arms held high over her shoulders. “Actually, it’s my job to know, kiddo.” She shone the flashlight through the back side of it and closed one eye to narrow her focus on the slightly translucent crystal. 

“Yeah, but in this case, best you don’t ask.”

She hummed and drew the rock closer to her face, narrowing her eye further. “It seems to have movement. A hum of sorts.” She looked past the rock toward him. “Is that normal?”

He nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he drawled. “It’s rare. So very rare, and it’s ancient.” He pursed his lips. “We’re talking millions of years old. Hundreds of millions.”

“Really?” she breathed out with definite interest. “And, does it have any particular use?” Her face took on an immediate and panicked expression. She lowered the rock to look at him. “This isn’t one of those voodoo-hocus-pocus telepathic stones is it? I’m not about to have my mind taken over or anything like that.” She held the rock to him. “Because been there, done that, got the bloody T-shirt and a lifetime worth of nightmares from it.”

He turned to face her; his brows high with eager curiosity. “Oh?”

“Well?” she demanded hotly. “Is it?”

His brows fell and he smiled with a shake of his head. “No. Not quite. Although yours is a story I’d like to hear.”

“But not one I’d like to recount any time soon, thank you,” she huffed. “So. So what is it, then?”

“It’s an energy source,” he answered with a wrinkle in one cheek and a lift in his lip in thought. “Potent. At times unstable. If used and handled correctly, you can power, oh, an entire town with one for a hundred years.”

“Okay,” she said warily knowing that there was definitely a _but_ in here. “And if it’s not used correctly”

He brought his hands together, then made a sound of explosion as he separated his hands. 

Bernice gulped and shifted her hands to tenderly cup the rock. “Oh, well, bloody hell, then.” She exhaled hard. “And you just go ahead and hand it to me like it’s just a benign bit of rock that’s a little bit pretty to look at.”

“Do we need to drop it and run?” Rose asked warily, her body tightening to ready for that possibility.

“Drop it, she says,” Bernice muttered. “He tells us it’s an explosive device and you suggest we drop it onto a hard and rocky ground.”

“Okay then,” Rose offered with a sniff. “Put it down very, very gently, and then we all leg it out of here.”

“Meanwhile leaving a potent explosive device _here_ , directly underneath Brax’s Collection.” She drew in a breath. “Where, I might add, he not only employs hundred of people, but welcomes visitors into the thousands every day.”

“Well I don’t know, then?” Rose huffed, throwing up her hands. “You don’t want to touch it, don’t want to leave it, what do you think we should do? Boot it like a soccer ball through the tunnels?”

Bernice actually looked to consider that – or she was merely imagining the scenario of them passing and kicking a rock out of the tunnels. After a moment she shook her head and looked to James for solution. “Got any ideas, Time Lord?”

He was leaned against the table, his arms folded across his chest and legs crossed at the ankle, just watching both women spar with a smile on his face. “Well. You can drop it if you want. Put it down gently. Or even kick it along the ground.” The side of his face lifted in a half smile. “It’s benign for the most part…”

“But you said…”

He held up one finger. “And you didn’t let me finish.”

“Well pardon me,” Bernice snapped. “But your charade of _boom_ certainly seemed pretty final and didn’t exactly look like you were going to expand with any further information.”

“I was taking a dramatic pause,” he said with a grin. 

“Are you sure you’re not Brax’s spawn?” Bernice growled. “Because if I was Rose, I’d definitely be looking to take a paternity test…”

“Oi!” Rose barked. “Just what are you implyin’?”

“Sounded better in my head, alright?” she groused in a low voice. She shuddered. “My mouth. It’s a defense mechanism against smart-arse Time Lords who get a kick out of messing with my head.”

“Not at my expense next time, yeah?” Rose huffed. “Love the old boy more’n anything. Give my life for him, I would. But _sleep_ with him.” She shuddered. “No, ta. No ta’s at all.”

Both Jason and James looked horrified. James shuddered and shook himself. “Thanks so much for that mental image that my quite frankly brilliantly vivid mind just provided.” He gagged. “Anyway. That rock, as it is, is not a danger.” He pushed himself off the table and strode toward her. With flourish he took it out of Bernice’s hands and tossed it casually between his hands. “See? Nothing bit a humming bit of petrified Ineok gamete.”

“It’s, I’m sorry, _what_?” Bernice asked with a cough. “That. That’s _sperm_?”

“Well, yes and no,” he drawled. “Yes, as in it is the reproductive cell cluster required for fertilization of a Ineok’s egg. Which is why it’s humming right now. Millions of years old, almost fully petrified, and still has full potency.” His nose crinkled. “But no as in … Well, not every species produces … _ehm_ .. the sticky liquid form of it – as what you may be used to…”

“Be careful, Time Lord,” she warned. “Don’t make assumptions, thank you.”

Rose shrank and held off a gag. “Well, this conversation just nosedived in to the absolutely gross and extremely inappropriate.” She looked at her future son. “How about you just get to it, James. Be short, be precise, and do consider your audience, yeah?”

He at least had the courtesy to appear chagrinned. With a wince he cleared his throat and nodded slowly. “Sorry Mum.” He drew in along breath and held the glistening, red crystal up. “The Ineok were a dragon-species of sorts. Solitary creatures – even during mating season. The male Ineok drop these rock-like deposits in a nest they’ve built for the purpose. Well, I say nest. It’s more a deep hole in the forest floor.” He looked at the rock, his face filled with interest in it. “The female then finds his deposit, leaves one of her own, and covers it up.” He settled the rock in against his waist with one arm. “About three years later, give or take, when both parents are already dead and their bodies contributing to the continual blood and bone fertilization of the forest floor, a brand new Ineok youngster rises up out of the ground and begins life.”

“Interesting story,” Jason murmured. “So, thanks for the alien biology lesson and all. But that really doesn’t give us any information at all that is in any way relevant.”

“I was getting to it,” he groaned. He drew in a breath. “When not merged with a female ovum, the sac-like deposit left by the male hardens into stone. As I said, potent little buggers in here full of energy, which is why it hums.” He petted the stone at his hip. “So, give it the correct harmonic wavelength signal, and you’ll excite the little beggars, make them happy, and create energy.”

“Give it the incorrect wavelength signal, Bernice offered. “And you, what? Over stimulate them?”

He nodded slowly. “And it doesn’t take much. One wrong step, a tiny little error in your calculation, and this thing becomes a volatile explosive. You’ll force multiplication, all of them creating energy until the crystal housing it can’t manage the multiplication anymore…”

Bernice gulped. “Please tell me that the thing you’re holding like a babe on your hip is fully and wholly intact.”

He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “No. It would seem that the transdimensional version of my father has been chipping at this thing for his own use. And for _what_ , well we have to assume it’s nefarious rather than for the good of all.” He turned to look at the table. “Now, We can try and piece together what is scattered around these various bits and bobs too see just what size shard is missing..”

“And assume that it’s all in one piece,” Jason said with a shift of his lips to one side. He looked at the fragments of red across the table. “We should call in a CIA analyst team to properly assess and collect whatever’s here. Lock it up in the vaults back on Gallifrey.”

“Meanwhile,” Bernice said with a growl. “Do we need to evacuate the asteroid? Get everyone off here until we can declare it safe?”

James and Jamie looked at each other with discomforted expressions. They turned their backs toward the ladies to speak amongst themselves quietly. “Collection’s still intact, right?” James asked worriedly.

“Yeah. No catastrophes in its history as far as I know.”

“Safe, then, you think?” He exhaled. “I mean, if we call an evac, we’re just going to incite panic. Your dad will _flip_. The one here now, and the one from our timeline … probably the four in between as well.”

“Without a doubt.” Jason pursed his lips. “Let’s get above ground, and I’ll contact Father. See if the timeline’s moving as it should.” He looked upward with a wince of concentration. “I mean, it feels stable, so…yeah.” he made a small sound that was unsure. “But the matricians will know for sure if it’s something we need to intervene on.”

Bernice popped her head in between the two of them. “Care to share with the rest of the class?” she demanded. “Not really the time to be huddling and talking in secrets.”

Jason looked toward her. “How’s your knowledge on the intricacies of Timeline interpretation? Hmmm? Because we’d be happy to share our discussion with you if you’re apt enough to understand…”

“Yeah, you’re definitely Brax’s kid,” Bernice muttered with a sneer as she stepped back to stand with Rose. “Arrogant and condescending know it all.”

“That’s first year Academy study,” Rose said with a light smirk. She looked to the side to share the joke with Leela. She frowned deeply to notice that she was gone. “Leela?” she called out with worry evident in her voice. “Leela!”

Jason was at his aunt’s side almost immediately. “What’s wrong?” he asked. It wasn’t a question that necessarily needed asking, it was obvious that they were short one member, but it made him feel better to ask anyway, to show Rose he was listening and joined in her concern.

“Leela’s gone,” Rose answered with deep concern. “God. She must’ve gotten bored with the chatter. She hates just standing around and nattering, when there’s prey out there to kill.” She exhaled hard. “ I should have known. Keep an eye on her, Rose. Keep a bloody eye on her.”

Bernice grabbed her gun from her holster and pointed to the two Time Lords. “You two stay here, and gather up as much of that red stuff, alien … guh,” she shuddered, unable to complete that particular thought. “Get as much of that rock as you can. Rose and I will go look for Leela.” She walked backward. “And for the sake of the Goddess, don’t leave this room. I’m the only one who knows their way around here, and I don’t have the time nor patience to arrange a Time Lord hunt because two of you were idiot enough to go wandering.”

Jamie shook his head. “You’re not taking my mother anywhere,” he warned darkly. “She stays here with me, safe.”

“Hardly _safe_ ,” Bernice countered. 

“Where I can keep her close to me, then,” he amended. He pointed downward to the floor. “Mum stays here with me.”

“Would you like me to _woof_ , James?” Rose asked with a narrowing in her eyes. “I do _not_ heel like a dog for you, for your dad, for anyone.” She looked at Bernice. “Got a gun for me as well?”

“Wish I did,” she answered. “But I don’t carry more than one of them at any time. Stay behind me, we’ll be okay.” One side of her face lifted to double-think that. “Well, as okay as we can be up against a psychotic Time Lord who may or may not be carrying around alien sperm to use as a bomb.”

“A typical Wednesday,” Rose sang out with an uneasy laugh. “How _brilliant_.”

“I said no,” James demanded sharply. “As the ranking officer here, acting on Presidential Orders, I demand that you stay right here.”

“Not CIA,” Bernice sang with a wink. “Nice try, though.”

A long howled cry sounded from deep inside the tunnel. Bernice and Rose looked toward each other with widened eyes, then took off down the tunnel.

Jason let out a long and loud multi-syllable Gallifreyan curse and pulled off the table. “Dunno about you, Cuz. But I’m not waiting around here like a coward.”

Jamie pulled his staser and exhaled a hard breath of annoyance. He set the rock on the table and rolled his shoulders. “Come on, then.”

As a pair the two CIA agents jogged back inside the tunnel. The blinked in the sudden darkness that greeted them the further they ran from the cavern, but their eyes quickly adjusted to the lack of light to allow them to see the curves and debris in front of them. They followed the sounds of scuffling, and of shouting, to lead them toward where the fight was obviously already underway.

Rounding a final corner, both James and Jason skidded and skipped to a stop at the end of a passage way. Their stasers were held at aim as they slowly stalked in the shadows.

Their presence was as yet undetected, and they had the perfect vantage point to the melee ahead . The Doctor of the alternate dimension was in a physical scuffle with Leela. There was a knife handle sticking out from his chest, and he battled against the arm that held a second blade.

“Fight me,” Leela growled hotly. “And you will only die tired. Submit, False Doctor. Your death is assured.”

“You were always a savage beast, Leela,” he snarled out. “No matter how long you spent on Gallifrey, amongst the finery of the capitol, afforded everything you could ever want, you could never be refined. Could you.”

“I do not need fine things,” she sneered. “I find what I need when I hunt.”

“Once a savage, always a savage,” he growled. “And today, you’re going to die a savage.” He grunted as he threw her off him. There was a hiss inside the curl of his lip as he gripped at the handle of her blade and pulled it from his chest. “And better yet. I’ll kill you with your own blade.”

Jason’s hand shifted to change the aim of his staser. “I can’t get solution,” he sneered quietly. “In between Leela, and Bernice and Rose standing about watching, I can’t get a clear shot.”

James inhaled deeply. “I’ll go around the edge, see what clearance I can get.” He pointed to the walls beside his cousin – opposite to the direction he wished to travel. “Go around there. See what you can find.”

“Our Lord President be with you,” Jason said to him with a nod. “For the sake of us both, be safe, Jamie.”

“Safe as I can be.” He smirked. “Hopefully I won’t see you on the other side of a regeneration.”

The parted and slowly crept through the darkness to come at the Doctor from both sides.

Inside the tight alcove, the Doctor and Leela battled on. Both of them stalking in a circle, flicking knives from one hand into the other as they waited for the other to break position to begin the fight.

“I can feel you,” the Doctor called out over Leela’s shoulder, all the while keeping his eyes locked upon his attacker. “My son, trying to be invisible and walk the perimeter.” He snickered. “Oh, do you have a lot to learn my boy. Especially when it comes to the projection of your familial bonds.”

“You are not my family,” Jamie called out from the darkness. He had yet to step out of the shadows. Although his telepathic signature was able to be sensed, the precise location of him was not so easily determined.

“He is my kill, son of the Doctor,” Leela warned him. “Not yours. You will let me kill him.”

“Oh,” the Doctor laughed low. “I really don’t think so.” He lifted a chain from the pocket of his waistcoat, the end of which a shard of the red stone hung and hummed. There was a glint of light coming from the crystal, and immediately a gasp of warning echoed through the chamber.

“Everyone get back,” James warned.

“That’s right,” the Doctor agreed with a deep laugh. “Get back indeed.” He looked around at the women that he could see, hoping to see any one of the two men that he couldn’t. “You know what this is, don’t you, Son?”

“Ineokite,” James answered through the darkness. 

“Yes,” he said with a smile. “My smart boy. A chip off the old block, aren’t you?” He lifted the shard, letting the light from within illuminate his face with a deathly red glow. “Clever piece of stone, this,” he began with his eyes initially on the light. He flicked his eyes toward Bernice and Rose. “Naturally sustainable energy when the wavelengths have been very carefully…”

“Yes, yes,” Rose said with a growl. “Already had the science lesson, ta.”

He frowned at her. “What is it with your extreme dislike of science, young lady.”

“Get the harmonic wavelength right, and it’s a source of power,” Bernice said flatly. “Get it wrong, and _boom_ , as is my understanding.”

“Crudely and quite simply put,” he remarked. “But yes, you are very correct my dear.”

She swallowed thickly. Her voice shifted to a light squeak as the brightness of the stone began to increase. “And. Um. What state do you have it in right now?”

“One guess,” he said with a low laugh. His eyes shifted to Leela. “Well? So who will kill who first? Do you think you can get your blades into my hearts before I kill all of us with this? Tell me, Savage, are you ready to die.”

“I am always ready to die,” she growled. “Especially when that death that is honourable.”

James’ eyes widened with concern at the rising glow of the shard. The rapidly increasing power within the stone meant that there would be absolutely no means of escape for any of them stuck here in the underground, nor for anyone in the Collection above their heads.

He swallowed deeply as he twisted at a ring that was fastened around his wrist. A small and crude device he’d created shortly after leaving the academy. An emergency teleport he dared not use on an ordinary day. It was unreliable and painful … He didn’t even know if he’d be able to materialise at all on the other end of it. But it was the only option available to any of them right now. It could very well mean his own death without regeneration on the other side of a transmat beam, but he couldn’t allow that much death and destruction. 

He launched forward from his position and tossed his staser to the side as he lunged toward the Doctor. He ducked down low and collected the man with his arms held tightly around his waist. “You’re coming with me,” he snarled out, his words ending with a long cry as the Doctor brought down his knife into Jamie’s back.

Blood sprayed from Jamie’s mouth as he belched out a pain cough that struggled to draw an inhale. He struggled to hold his arms around the Doctor but was able to activate the device around his wrist. He felt the short energy build and the searing pain inside his chest as every cell of his body began to dematerialise. He looked sadly toward Rose when she cried out for him. Peripherally, he could hear the desperate call of his cousin, but he kept his focus on his mother.

“I love you, Mum. Good bye.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	58. Sorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A travel capsule is in pain....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING for graphic injury description and general ickiness involving blood.
> 
> So to update the confused: Yesterday I did post a chapter... Totally did... However, it was pointed out to me that it was really ... ehm ... trigger material of sorts. I blanched in horror and quite quickly pulled the chapter as a result and today rewrote the offending section.
> 
> The first part of the chapter is relatively unchanged (well, I changed like a tiny bit of it), but the second section is completely and utterly brand spanking new .. which takes this in a very different direction than originally planned.
> 
> As this is changed, the ending of the last chapter is .... well, it doesn't really fit anymore. So, I will rewrite to fit and expand for posting tomorrow.
> 
> I certainly hope this is better than yesterday's offering. I hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

The lone Gallifreyan Time Capsule that stood quietly in the carpark of the Braxiatel Collection issued a random and shrill pitched cry toward the Time Vortex. Exhausted passers by, those who had wandered the entire collection for hours, looked upon the tall cylindrical vessel with pinched eyes and curious expressions. Yes, they were quite familiar with the sounds of vehicle alarms – even those that had a voice alarm warning one to step away from the vehicle. But the travel capsules of the Time Lords rarely made a sound. They stood tall and proud as their own warning when in cylinder form. No one would dare attempt to break into one of these ships.

It let out another cry toward the vortex, a sound of such presence and power, that it was almost visible.

“What in the name of Necuns is wrong with that thing?” one visitor asked with a wince as he covered his ears. “What a horrendous sound.”

“I really don’t know,” his partner answered softly. 

Another visitor, a female with green skin and two pairs of arms, stood at the side of the curious pair of Neconians. “It’s a Gallifreyan Time Capsule. Legend has it that these capsules have a telepathic link to their Time Lord. If something happens to their pilot, they feel it deep inside their own hearts, and grieve their loss.”

“That would suggest they are sentient,” the male commented with a frown. “And surely they aren’t.”

She shrugged. “I said _legend_ , not fact. Who knows with Gallifreyans? Secretive lot that they are. I’m certainly convinced that they create their own rumours to spread across the universe to make themselves look good.”

There was a rumble in the distance, a sound of thunder, and all three persons looked toward the gardens of the Collection with curiosity. The rumble drew quickly closer to them, a freight train sound, that grumbled and thundered in warning.

“I don’t like that,” the green-skinned woman moaned out. “On my home planet, that is a warning of…” she let out a yelp as the ground shuddered underneath her feet. The rumble under their feet was joined by a sudden, and heavy blast of heated air far hotter than the regular temperature of the asteroid. 

Immediately each member of the three-strong group, scattered with a yelp and fled the face of the capsule in agony.

A howl and whine from another ship joined the sorrowful cry of the capsule. A third ship joined the symphony of sorrow and within a moment, silver cylinders shimmered into existence either side of the ailing craft. Their pulsing of materialisation brought with it the cool winds of the vortex that whipped a frenzy against the superheated winds from a distant explosion. A tornado of battling winds quickly engulfed all three machines that lifted a funnel up into a single cloud above them. They were all obscured and engulfed inside an ancient, powerful energy as the materialisation slowly completed.

The winds died down as quickly as they had whipped up, although the howling of the young ship in between the two returning crafts lingered on.

There was a creak in the door of the eldest ship as it opened in a light whine of metal against metal that demanded a few drops of oil. Romana exited the ship ahead of Braxiatel. She gave a tired wipe of the back of her sleeve against her sweated forehead and walked out to stand in the face of an ailing craft. Her head angled curiously at it as she wondered just which Time Lord had arrived on KS-159. It certainly wasn’t one of the crafts from Estrail, it had too much of a future timeline essence wrapped around it.

“I wonder,” she said quietly as she felt Braxiatel move to her side. “Who pilots this ship.”

“Quite possibly one of the young CIA agents who materialised here in search of a transtemporal criminal,” he answered gruffly.

Romana turned her head toward him, but kept her focus on the ship, and on her light and sorrowful whining. “Of which one has been mortally injured,” she noted. “If her extreme upset is anything to go by.”

“Oh,” he moaned out long as he heard the pain that was inside the ship. He gulped a thick swallow and covered his mouth in his hand. There was a look of concern and worry inside his blue eyes. “That is not good. Not good at all.”

“Well of course it isn’t,” Romana huffed without noting Braxiatel’s worried expression. “There is a mortally wounded, possibly already deceased Time Lord somewhere on this asteroid.” She spun to face him directly. “And it now falls upon you – the owner of this planetoid – to locate that Time Lord and ensure he or she is returned to their capsule and returned to Gallifrey.”

“Indeed,” he said under his breath in acceptance of her order. He uncovered his mouth and let his hand fall to his side. “I will do my best to locate and …” he blew out a long breath. “And do my best to have him repatriated.” He licked at his lip and gestured to the main building of the Collection. “And in the meantime, might I suggest that you head back into the offices. Do let Diana … _Narvin_ … know that she is to offer you all of the courtesies and…”

“I will be with _you_ ,” she interrupted firmly. “This Time Lord or Lady is one of my people and so I will be sure that I will join you to make sure they are sent home.”

“I really would suggest that you don’t, My Lady,” Braxiatel said on a low voice that held light warning within it. “It is an endeavour that is ..” He drew in a breath. “…quite frankly beneath your station. Leave this to me.”

“I have learned over the past while, Braxiatel, that _stations_ within society are an outdated and very discriminatory practice…”

“And sometimes those separations are necessary to maintain order amongst all peoples,” he reminded her coolly. “While you do have a very honourable view toward equality toward all, you are our _Lady President_ and are therefore –“

“I am _still_ Gallifreyan,” she interrupted sharply. “My only sense of _anything_ at this moment is focused upon a Time Lord who is in need of being found, honoured for his loss, and returned home for a ceremony and service befitting a Time Lord mortally wounded in performing his duty to Gallifrey.”

“But my Lady,” he breathed out with caution in his tone. He switched gears quickly to plead to her not as the President, but as his friend and his future lover. “Romana. I implore you. This is a duty that needs to be left to those of us who…”

“Don’t argue with me, Braxiatel,” she growled.

“In this instance I feel that I must.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. There was something Braxiatel was clearly hiding from her about the identity of the Time Lord in question. A rather well shielded poker face he may have had, Romana could almost always see the finest cracks within his otherwise emotionless façade. “Who is he?” She asked with a low growl in her tone. “And why are you so insistent that I be kept away from him?”

“He is no one that you _know_ ,” he said with the lightest of bows in his head. “And therefore, he’s not entirely your concern. This Lord did not travel alone. I am quite certain that his condition is being appropriately addressed by his partner.”

“Unless his partner is in the same grave condition as he,” Romana replied with a lift in her nose. “You have indicated to me that you are aware of CIA and their reasons for being here. If this criminal they were hunting has defeated them both…”

“Then I fear for the safety of the entire universe,” he muttered under his breath with a flick of his eyes away from hers.

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing, my Lady,” he answered with an unhappy one-sided smile. “But again, I find that I must caution quite vehemently against your desire to locate these individuals. I assure you that I have the means to retrieve them both if required.”

“My wish is _supposed_ to be your command,” she challenged him.

“Only when your wish won’t put you in harm,” he corrected her. “Then I will grant you any one of your wishes as command with honour and without question.” He swallowed thickly. The expression held within the deep blue depths of his eyes pleaded with her to listen to him. “So right now, my Lady. I implore you. Please return to the collection and allow me to take this task from you.”

“What aren’t you telling me?” she questioned worriedly.

He exhaled a long and slow breath and lifted his hand to cup tenderly at her cheek. “You know who these men are after, Romana,” he began gently. “They seek to apprehend the anomaly that fell into the dimension with me so many decades ago. His presence has been like a Meiphru-fly, plucking at the strings and sending ripples into the web of time.”

“The Burner,” she breathed out with understanding.

“Indeed, my Lady,” he agreed softly. “And although an anomaly, he is still the Doctor, still my brother. He is not so easily apprehended and caged. If he was, I would have done so decades ago.”

“Unless your own sense of honour towards him simply hasn’t allowed you to,” she argued softly. “You’d rather keep an eye on him, protect him.”

He shook his head. “No. Not this one, Romana. He is beyond my help – driven mad by a dimension unwilling to accept his presence, poking hard at his senses, reminding him that he does not belong here.” The cup of his hand shifted to hold her cheek protectively rather than simply with tenderness. “He is dangerous, Romana. Very dangerous. I don’t want you in his line of sight.” His thumb dragged across her lower lip. “If he hurt you. I would not be contained in my fury.”

“Brax…”

“I _can_ demand it, Romana,” he reminded her. “Force you to acquiesce, but I don’t want to have to do that.” His breath escaped his lips with a light whuff of air, which he immediately drew back in through his nose. “So instead I simply implore you.”

“And if I say no, you will demand it of me and order me locked within your collection,” she surmised with a slow blink of her eyes.

“I will,” he assured her. “We have to assume that he has defeated two CIA agents carrying advanced weaponry. I can send word to the Narvin within this timestream, and have him send reinforcements…”

A loud, feminine scream of pure heartache sailed quickly across the carefully manicured landscape of the Collection gardens. Immediately, Braxiatel took Romana’s hand in his and tugged her to draw her up toward the building. “My Lady,” he warned urgently. “We must get you to safety.”

She didn’t budge. “That was Rose,” she murmured with growing concern.

“And if it was, then I will send security..”

“No,” she demanded with a pant in her tone. She strode forward, extending her arm between them as he remained in place, his hand held firmly inside his. “I need to make sure that Rose is okay – because it certainly doesn’t sound as though she is.”

“Bernice and Leela are with her,” he offered.

The wailing sound of Rose Tyler wound through the hedges and sculptures of the garden once more, this time her cry held a name within it. 

“By the Gods,” Braxiatel breathed out long and quietly.

“Who is Jamie?” Romana asked urgently. “And why is she clearly mourning him?”

“Get inside, Romana,” he demanded sharply. “And I won’t take no for an answer. You will do as I ask, for your safety.”

“I will do no such thing,” she snapped with a hard tug of her hand to separate them. “Rose is clearly distressed, and I will not run away like a frightened child when it is clear that she needs my support.”

“Romana,” he growled angrily as she lifted her skirts to run over the curb toward the gardens. “Rassilon’s ghost, why won’t you listen to me.” His head shook and his eyes narrowed as he leaned forward and launched into a run after her.

~~oooOOOooo~~

They fell out of the transmat beam with a cough and a splutter, both men tumbling out gracelessly onto the lush and unkempt grasses beyond the borders of the Collection grounds. Their hearts thudded hard against their ribcages, struggling to maintain rhythm after the rematerialisation of each one of their cells.

The Doctor rolled sideways, ending on his belly. He quickly scrambled to get onto his hands and knees, falling once back onto his face before being able to find his strength to hold a crawl. He coughed down onto the grasses, the force of his barking drawing wetness from the very back of his throat to glisten and string from his lips and teeth.

Beside the Doctor, Jamie lay on his side. The fluid coming from his mouth was a deep orange and crimson colour that stained his lips and chin. He struggled to move from his side, but with a couple of concerted pushes, was able to roll forward onto his belly. His knees crawled forward to underneath his belly, leaving the young man with his rump in the air and his cheek in the grass. Although in immeasurable pain, the lad didn’t whimper or dissolve into tears. Instead, he fought against his agony and panted hard at the ground, drawing blades of grass up against his teeth and tongue with each inhale.

“You stupid boy,” the Doctor snarled after a moment. “You stupid, stupid boy.”

Jamie didn’t answer. Instead he closed his eyes to try and suppress the pain in between his shoulder blades and the sucking wound left by the Doctor’s blade. His lung was punctured. For now, and until he could get proper medical help, he was going to have to rely on his respiratory bypass to get him through.

“What kind of devices are they issuing CIA agents these days?” he continued. “That it would tear a user apart like that?”

“It wasn’t CIA-issue,” Jamie managed thought a hacking cough that sprayed blood onto the grass. “Time ring .. couldn’t get signal from Gallifrey.” He panted a couple of breaths to refill the reserves in his bypass. “My own creation. Doesn’t need … connection to Gallifrey.”

“Definitely my son,” he muttered with a spit at the ground.

“ _Not_ your son,” Jamie corrected after a hack and a spit of blood at the ground. He lost strength to support his raised rump. His knees slid out from underneath him to lay him flat on his belly. “Not even … close.”

The Doctor crawled slowly across the grass toward when Jamie lay on the grass. The white undershirt that he wore was stained a dark orange and red, more the colour of fire than crimson. That stain slowly spread across the fabric, bubbling and hissing when the young man tried to draw in a breath to refill his bypass.

“This was not my intention,” he said gravely, his eyes on the split in the fabric. “You struck me in the wrong way, son.” He grit his teeth and cast his eyes to the bloody blade still in his hand. With a hiss he tossed it off to one side. “It was instinct to strike back, that’s all. Not consciously intentional.”

“I know,” Jamie replied softly. “Even driven insane … by an unrelenting … dimension…” he drew in a hard breath. “The Doctor would never…” He pressed the flats of his hands into the grass to try and push himself up off his chest, but only managed to cough hard and fall back down. “I … I need to … regenerate.”

“The wound is – for now – treatable,” the Doctor offered quietly. “You can’t. Not yet.”

“I can barely … move,” he grit out after an effort to lift himself again. “For the love of Omega, this hurts.”

“If you think it hurts now,” the Doctor said quietly. “Wait until the fires of regeneration are upon you.” He exhaled a breath and lifted to seat himself on the grass beside Jamie. His eyes looked across the distance as he pulled a knee to his chest and circled both arms around it. “In my home dimension, I was the Lord Burner,” he began in tale. “The task fell upon me to force erasure of Lords from the timeline. At the whim of my President, I was to assassinate her chosen target.”

“Why … why are you telling me this?” Jamie croaked out hard. “You should … run … while you can.” He drew in a breath, but quickly coughed it back out. “Jason _will_ kill you.”

“And it may well be a relief,” he answered with a sigh. Both hands shifted from his knee to hold at both sides of his head. “This dimension is killing me, anyway. Slow. Painful.” He drew in a breath but didn’t let his hands fall from his head. “I don’t belong here. I _already_ exist.”

Jamie coughed again but said nothing.

“Before I fell into this dimension,” the Doctor continued on. He removed his head from his hands and circled them around his knee once more. “I was tasked with burning the temporal anomalies that had arrived in our dimension. Eliminate the potential paradoxes that could destroy Gallifrey.” He looked downward. “An order that I could not disobey.” A small smirk grazed one side of his mouth. “When President Romana hands down order, you don’t question it.”

James gave a light chuckle of agreement to that. The chuckle quickly turned to a cough.

“The order, however,” he continued. “Well. It was presented to me in such a manner that it was open to my own interpretation.” He looked to James. “Not that I would tell her Lady President the obtuse nature of her demand. And while I feign obsequiousness sycophant adherence to all of her orders, I do sometimes leap through the loopholes in order to maintain at least a small measure of my own will.” 

His eyes moved to the horizon once more. “When I caught the telepathic signature of Braxiatel.” He smirked. “Well. I modified the orders to remove that walking paradox from the timeline instead.”

“He’s done … nothing ... to you.”

The Doctor shot a fast look toward James. “Perhaps not inside this dimension.”

“I’d repeat that,” Jamie choked. “But…” He coughed again.

“Don’t speak,” the Doctor warned gently. “But let me.” He lowered his head and looked across at the horizon through the hair of his brows and the curl of his fringe. “When Braxiatel and I fell into the closing dimensional portal in the Axis, and we both landed inside this parallel.” He exhaled. “Well, I became the walking paradox, didn’t I?”

Jamie snorted.

“Transdimensional anomaly… the thing I was working to burn from the timeline.”

“Yeah, well when Jase gets here …” Jamie said with a cough. “He’ll burn you … from this one.”

The Doctor shifted a narrow-eyed look toward the son of this dimension. “So eager to see me burn, aren’t you?” he questioned with some surprise.

“You hurt …” he coughed. “You hurt my Mum.” He sniffed and winced with pain. “No one hurts .. my mum.”

“Ahhhh,” he breathed out long. “Yes. The throttling.” He huffed out hard. “Not the first time I’ve throttled someone that I should care about.” He opened up his hands to look at his palms. “These hands of mine. I oftentimes suspect they have a mind of their own.”

“Not … an excuse,” Jamie said with a wet growl.

“Indeed no,” he agreed with a light tone. “Indeed not at all, my dear boy.” He closed his hands and let out a long breath as he looked to the ground. “There is no excuse at all. Particularly against someone I should be protecting.”

“Against … anyone.” He let out a long and hard series of coughs and groaned to roll onto his back. “But. Yeah. Not Mum.”

“An intriguing woman,” the Doctor admitted softly. “So very intriguing.”

“You love her,” Jamie offered. “More than your own … existence.”

“No,” he said with a shake of his head. “I don’t. At least not _this_ me.” He looked to the horizon. “It’s impossible for me to give my hearts when I don’t have any to give.” He looked back to Jamie. “They were ripped from my chest when I was forced to become a killer of my kind.”

“Mum …” He panted, his breaths requiring far more effort to draw in. “She is their beat.”

“Not mine,” he said with a long sigh. “I’m afraid the possibility is … well … quite impossible.”

“She’s dead,” Jamie said sadly. “In my ... timeline. Mum and Tonzarina Romana… Gone.”

He flicked a look toward the quickly waning young man. “Ahhh,” he breathed out knowingly. “Hence your overprotective nature toward her. It would be difficult to have to lose her twice, I suppose.”

“Can’t lose her… ever,” he corrected.

“You will regenerate soon,” the Doctor muttered. “I can hear your heartsbeats slowing.” He gave him a small smile. “Regenerate into an incarnation that is not so hurt by her loss.”

“Her loss ….” He drew in a shuddered breath. “It keeps me … fighting.”

The Doctor exhaled hard, stretched out his leg, and lay back on the grass beside Jamie. “The Ineokite. It’s going to kill us both.”

“I know,” Jamie managed on little more than a whisper. “Why … why did you activate it?”

“Insanity,” he replied in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. “The last resort of a madman without a box.” He drew in a deep breath and held it a moment. When he spoke next, it was with a lightly strangled tone. “This dimension is destroying my mind. Pulling me apart piece by piece. Its worse than the sounds of drums in the mind, or the ringing in one’s ears. Worse than the pulsing pains of injury, or hiccups you can’t stop.” A tear fell from the very corner of his eye. “And faced with being dragged back to Gallifrey to spend the rest of my lives locked up inside Shada.” He gulped and closed his eyes. “The final extermination of all I ever was. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Killing … is not the … answer,” Jamie said with a whisper. “Tonza … President Braxiatel … He’s fair. Understanding. A deal could …” His shoulders lifted from the grass as he coughed and then gasped to draw in any air. “Could… be…”

The Doctor shushed him gently. “Don’t speak. Focus on regenerating, son. Perhaps you might survive the explosion if you can be protected in the Lindos wash.” 

“I’m not ….” He groaned through his teeth. “Your son.”

“Give me at least that before I die,” he pleaded. 

“I … can’t.”

The Doctor lifted his hand to look upon the crystal that hung from a chain on his fingers. It was hot and bright, the hum of it zinging like a forest filled with cicadas. He swung it side to side then pulled it up by the chain toward his fingers. “For what it may be worth to you, my boy. I _am_ sorry.” Her curled his hand around the crystal. “And I would have been so proud to…”

“Don’t,” Jamie managed on a firm voice. “Don’t say it.”

“Because you can’t find pride for me,” he admitted with a one-sided smile. “I don’t blame you, of course.”

Jamie’s eyes were locked on the small beams of red light that beamed through the gaps of the Doctor’s fingers. There was slight movement in his head, and then in his shoulders, as he moved to draw his staser from his holster. “Throw it,” he suggested with a wet croak.

“I’m sorry?” the Doctor queried with a frown creasing his brow as he shifted his head to look at the ailing young man.

“Throw it,” he said again with a groan. He shifted his hand to settle his staser on his belly. With a wince he drew the other hand to hold the weapon inside both. “Up. As high .. as you can. If I shoot it, we can … save … the asteroid surface from … too much … damage.”

“Are you even capable of that right now?” the Doctor queried. He looked at the shard. “This piece is so small, that your chances of a true shot are near impossible.”

“Tonza Brax taught me … to shoot.” He drew in a breath and brought the weapon up along his chest. “Throw it.”

“I still don’t believe you can take the shot,” the Doctor said gruffly. “Look at you, you can barely hold your weapon, let alone fire it.” He huffed. “Accuracy, even if you were completely healthy, is near impossible.”

“I said … throw it,” he ordered with a snarl in his voice. “We’re going to … die anyway. What difference ... does it make?”

“That is a good point.” He grunted as he lifted his shoulders to bring himself to a seated position. Shortly after getting onto his rump, he leaned forward to bring himself to his knees. He pulled the crystal free from the chain and looked toward Jamie. “You will only have one shot at this,” he remarked.

“Pun intended?”

“No. Not quite.” He shrugged. “Are you ready?”

Still on his back, with his pallor a sickly white, Jamie gingerly held up the staser with both hands. His hold was shaky and weak. “Be quick … don’t have the strength … to hold this … too long.”

“Right. Of course.” He drew in a breath and began to windmill his arm in wide circles. His lip curled high on the final lower swoop and with a cry he released the crystal to throw it high up above them. “Now!”

Jamie grit his teeth, closed one eye to narrow his focus, then lifted the staser high off his shoulders. Held now in front of his face, his eye down along the barrel of the weapon, James braced himself for the kick-back of the shot. He drew in a breath, held it to wait for the crystal to reach the apex of its upward climb. As it hovered for just a second and began a fast downard trajectory, he squeezed the trigger of his weapon. The pressure of the laser blast slammed the weapon down against his chin. His arms flopped down and his head turned to one side.

The Doctor turned away from the laser beam heading toward the falling crystal. While there would be little to no protection for either of them from the resulting blast, he did what he could to cover Jamie’s now lifeless, breathless body with his.

“If it is the last thing that I do,” he vowed as the explosion rang out over head. “Let me protect my son…”

~~ooooOOOooo~~


	59. Regenerate!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Regenerations need to happen....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dunno what to say about this except: I lost the battle against this chapter. I fought hard, really I did, but this thing beat me, power slammed me, tossed me against the rails, and .... yeah ... all that and then some. And I am so done with it, you have no idea..... So here we are... and you know what? It was all Brax's fault... yep! Oh, he was difficult today... so damn difficult and indignant, and ugh.... Never have I ever had a problem with Brax ... Who needs to drink a shot after that?
> 
> Thanks to my Discord peeps for keeping me going today .... (you know who you are) oooh, I needed you guys! My muses, all of you! Even when you do distract me with shiny, pretty Who/Gallifrey things....
> 
> Anyway: WARNING: Character death.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it...

~~ooooOOOooo~~

Each remaining member of the underground party were thankful that not only was Bernice Summerfield so damn brilliant that she had each and every possible pathway through the tunnel system of the asteroid memorised … but that she was also a really swift runner.

Bernice led the group of four through tunnels that were basically pitch black – save the occasional luminescent worms that hung from the roof of the tunnels via a thin silken strand – with such precision and speed, that it took less than ten minutes for them to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Literally. That small pinprick of light grew with each forward stride, and within short time, they’d burst through the mouth of a cave and into the waning heat of a dying day outside.

No sooner had they shot out of the cavern, however, a massive shockwave from an explosion high and ahead of them knocked them all into backward stumbles. Rose and Bernice stumbled into a fall against the wall, Jason fell to his knee in the dirt. Only Leela remained on her feet. She stood firm against the pressure of the fire heated winds of explosion. Her hair flew up with the wind, as did the leather of her skirt, but she didn’t shift a muscle until it was over. Then, and only then, she strode forward as if nothing had happened at all.

“Come,” she called out to the group behind her. “We must not waste any time. It will be dark soon, and I do not wish to be caught in the darkness of night.”

Jason shot ahead of the entire group as they resumed their forward walk. He shot by Leela and cupped his hands around his mouth. He called out loudly to his cousin, using both the long and short forms of his name as he walked a wide circle. He pleaded for his cousin to answer, begged him to do anything, say anything, and he’d be right there to help him. The only answer he received was silence. 

It was a long handful of seconds, despite feeling as though long minutes or even hours had passed, and Jason finally dropped to the ground on his knees with his backside on his heels. His open palms came down on top of his knees, and his whole body shook and shuddered as he let the reality of the situation engulf him completely.

“Not _Jamie_ ,” he said with a shake in his head that swayed his entire body. “Gods, anyone but him. Anyone but _him_ …” he lifted tearful eyes to the sky. “Take me, damn you,” he ordered harshly. “I’m the unforgiving, unrelenting arsehole between the two of us. Not him. He’s actually decent….” His head dropped forward, his wide eyes unfocused and filled with tears. “He was a good man. A _damn_ good one.”

“Take heart in knowing that your cousin died an honourable death,” Leela offered gently. “A death he and you should be proud of.”

“I’m proud of _nothing_ ,” he yelled back in anger. He pointed out in the distance and jutted his hand with hard movements to punctuate his words. “How can you be proud of a death like that – at the hands of his own _father_?”

She put her hand on his shoulder, clutching her fingers deep and hard to hold him in place when he tried to jerk away from her. “Your cousin. He sacrificed his own life to save you, his mother, me, and Bernice…” She looked down along her shoulder toward where she could see the shimmer of the Collection building in the distance. “Saving the lives of every soul on this planet. That is a death to hold great pride in.”

“And I’d let every one of them – and you – die to get him back,” he snarled.

“You dishonour your cousin when you say that,” she warned him. 

Jason shot up to a stand and spun to glare toward Leela. His blue eyes were alight with absolute incandescent fury toward the entire universe. “He was more than just my _cousin,_ Leela. He was my _brother_.” He strode a single stride toward her, close to chest to chest with her, his height forcing him to look down at her. “We were born in the same hospital, in the same room, less than three minutes apart. Both of us born of the seeds of the once mighty house of Lungbarrow.” He drew in a couple of panted breaths and lowered the volume of his voice to a firm but quite tone. “We may have been born inside the wails of different mothers and sired by different men, but we were twins, Jamie and me. Born into the waiting hands of the same doctor, screaming the same cries, with the same demands of our mothers. Our destinies entwined so that we walk the universe … _save_ the universe … _together_.”

Leela’s eyes narrowed with anger. “You do not talk to me this way,” she seethed. “Even if you do grieve the loss of the one who is your brother.”

Rose’s hands curled around Jason’s arm. She gave him a slight tug to pull him away from Leela. “Jason. Come here…”

He slumped but allowed himself to be pulled back from Leela. His frame shook and his head hung low. He was completely nonresponsive even when Rose pulled him into her arms. All he did was stand with his head hung and his shoulders slumping down low.

“Don’t give up on him,” Rose said with a growl of vehemence in her voice. “He’s not dead. He’s not.”

He finally lifted his arms to lightly circle her waist. It was a half-arsed effort for sure. “I can’t feel him in my head, Tonzarina,” he admitted tearfully. “He’s not in there.”

“But he’s in mine,” she whispered against the side of his head, her lips grazing at his temple. “He’s weak, but he’s in there.”

His slump turned toward stiffness. “Then he’s regenerating,” he huffed out with mild excitement in his tone. “That’s it. That _has_ to be it. Gone from my mind, but still in yours…”

“That has to be it,” she whispered unsurely. Truth was, she couldn’t feel him at all, but she didn’t want to tell his cousin that. “So. So, we need to find him, yeah? He needs help, and we have to give it.”

“You’re right,” he said with an urgent nod of his head. He backed away from her and pulled a small communications device/scanner from his pocket. “Of course, you’re right. You’re _always_ right!” He held the device out in front of him and walked a tight line, sweeping the device left and right across his body.

Rose covered her mouth with one hand watching him perform his search. She stepped backward, almost colliding with Bernice as she joined the other ladies just beyond the mouth of the cave.

“God,” she managed out with a light choke in her voice. “Please find him.”

“You lied to him, didn’t you?” Bernice asked her with accusation in her tone. “You can’t feel James at all in your mind, can you?”

“I can’t,” she admitted. “But I had to say something to get him moving. Give him some form of hope.”

Leela clicked her tongue and shook her head. “Lies are what Time Lords tell, Rose. You are not a Time Lord. Do not be like them.”

“Yeah,” she breathed out sadly. “Guess they’re rubbing off on me, then, aren’t they?”

“False hope is worse than no hope at all,” Bernice cautioned. She stepped forward with a shake in her head. “Hard truths are the only option in moments like this, Rose. He’s an adult, best you treat him like one.” She thumbed at her nose and looked down along her shoulder at Rose as she passed by. “Because you know damn well that his father wouldn’t sugar-coat it for him. That’s not entirely within Brax’s capability: having any form of empathy toward others.”

“You’d be very surprised to know he does,” Rose countered as she strode forward behind Bernice. “Brax – at least the one I know – he’s very empathetic.” She sighed and spoke quietly. “Hearts as big as the entire universe.”

Bernice snorted a laugh out of her nose. “Yeah, right. You sure that you’re from this dimension? The one I know, well. He’s so out of touch with any kind of feeling toward anyone that isn’t himself that he wouldn’t know how to show empathy toward others, let alone be bothered to even fake it.”

Leela let out a light growl. “Braxiatel is a complicated man,” she admitted. “He cares. He hates. He loves. If he feels that you are worth caring about, then he _will_ show you his hearts.”

“Yes, yes,” Bernice sighed with her eyes to the sky. “More facets than a diamond. I get it. I’m sure he’ll be _thrilled_ to hear that, and probably bloody well agree with you as well, if only because it’ll make _him_ look good to others.”

“Nah,” Rose breathed quietly. “He’d vehemently deny it.”

The women fell into silence as they followed behind Jason. Rose gnawed on a hangnail on her thumb, making sucking, clicking sounds as she did. As annoying as it was to the other two, neither chose to comment or try to stop her from doing it. She was clearly doing it as a means of self-regulation. Leela could see the shudder in her tiny form that rippled from head to feet each time she removed the thumb from her mouth.

“Perhaps you should call the Doctor,” she offered after a moment. 

“Which one?” Rose asked on a shaking breath as she finally pulled her thumb from her mouth and raked her fingers through her hair. “And what do I say? Hi Darling, it’s me. Just wanted to let you know that during the trip that I didn’t tell you I was going on; I met our future son. What a beautiful man he became, so much like you. God, you’d be so proud of him.” She cleared her throat and her voice began to waver. “But .. but I’m a terrible mum, Doctor, because I let him die.” She stilled and drew in a deep breath. Her hand lifted to cover her mouth. “God. I let our son die. Our baby boy.”

“Oh hell,” Bernice said with a mutter. “We’ve lost her. Hoped we might at least get back to the Collection before she shattered.” She instinctively wrapped her arms around the shuddering woman. While comfort wasn’t exactly high on her list of special abilities, she certainly did her best to channel the mother within her to offer the support that she could.

“I do hope that this Doctor is still alive,” Leela said with a growl. “Because I will kill him. He deserves to fall on my blades and pay for what he has done.”

“Shouldn’t that be Rose’s honour?” Bernice asked quietly with a look toward the warrior that stood tall, with her shoulders back and her head high. “James was her son, after all.”

Leela looked toward Rose. “I know that Rose is not a killer,” she said with softness in her tone. “Rose uses her words and her kindness, not blade and weapons. She would leave his hearts beating.” She looked away. “I will not.”

“ _She_ is right here,” Rose murmured loud enough to get Leela’s attention. Once her brown eyes had found hers, she offered Leela a small smile. “But you’re right. Of course.”

“Well, of course I am,” she said with a sigh. “We have been friends for far too long now not to know you so well, Rose.” Her head shot to the front at a long howl from Jason. “I think that the one born of Romana has found something.” She swallowed hard. “And it is not a good find.”

Rose quickly separated from Bernice and ran toward the top of what appeared to be the top of a hill where her nephew had disappeared. She skidded to a stop with a sideways slide along the green grasses at the very top and held onto her breath. She needed to properly brace herself for whatever horror lay at the bottom, and judging by the devastation she could hear inside Jason’s broken voice it was most certainly a horror that awaited them at the bottom.

She barely got a chance to really look down the hill before she felt not one, but two very strong pairs of arms come around her to hold her in place. Leela stepped ahead of her to block her view of the bottom of the crater.

“Do not go down there,” Leela warned with sadness and warning in her voice. 

“By the will of the Goddess,” Bernice added as she attempted to cover Rose’s eyes with a hand. “Don’t even _look_ down there.”

Rose couldn’t help but look down there. She dodged Leela’s efforts to shield her from the sight and leaned over the edge of what was now most obviously a crater of sorts. What she saw down in the very centre of it made her retch almost immediately. 

Two bodies lay intertwined at the very centre of the crater. One atop the other. The figure that lay over the top of the other had horrific burns to his back and clothing. The remnants of yellow amongst the torn, shredded, blackened clothing identified the man as the Burner Doctor. He lay in a diagonal manner across the body of the man beneath him in a manner that appeared to have been very deliberate. They were chest to chest, the Doctor’s head held sideways against Jamie’s face; his cheek over his nose. His arms were circled over the young man’s head, one leg draped across his thighs.

It was clear that the Doctor had attempted to shield Jamie from the blast as best he could … which made little sense to her.

When the Doctor let out an agonised groan and moved slowly off Jamie, her eyes drifted to the form of her future child. The limp and lifeless body dressed in burned and bloody black and white was near unrecognisable to her. There was an open-eyed stare on his face that held no focus, no life. Whatever spirit had held him to this universe in that beautiful form of his had already moved on. It had no desire to stick around.

Rose watched the dual feet slide of Jason through blackened sands as he rushed to get to his cousin. The devastation she could see in the young man shattered her heart just as much as the frozen stare of the adult son she hadn’t even conceived yet.

With a shake, a sob, and a howl, she called out to her boy. She yelled his name across the grasses in a desperate plea toward that brave young man to please wake up, please regenerate, please do anything that wasn’t being dead. As Jason fell to his hip beside Jamie and dropped low to pull and then clutch his cousin against his chest in a defeated and devastated rocking motion, Rose faltered and fell to a knee, despite being held up by both Leela and Bernice. Both women stooped to maintain their hold of her as she fell.

“This has gone in a much more sideways direction that I thought possible,” Bernice muttered as she lowered into a crouch at Rose’s side.

“Have you ever travelled with the Doctor?” Leela asked with a light huff in her tone. She released her hold on Rose to stand tall over them both.

“I have,” Bernice answered with a one-sided smirk. “He’d call this a typical weekday, right?”

“I do not know that he would say that,” Leela said curiously. “But trouble always follows his path. I think that his child invites the same trouble.” A holler off in the distance captured Leela’s attention. She snapped her head to the side, her eyes narrowed in warning and her hand braced on the hilt of her knife ready to strike if necessary. The flowing silks of Romana’s dress, and the tall form of Braxiatel growing larger in the distance gave her pause to exhale. “This will not end well,” she muttered underneath her breath.

“What?” Bernice asked. She shielded her eyes against the sunset with the flat of her hand to look across the grasses toward the movement in the distance. “Ah. Yes. Reinforcements are enroute.” She looked down to Rose, who wasn’t crying, but merely rocked backward and forward on her knees. “Your Gallifreyan Princess is on her way, hopefully she’s better at this comfort thing than I am.” A brow flicked. “Although, she’s Time Lord… so…”

“Out of my way,” Romana demanded with a shove as she curled around Bernice to drop to her knees beside Rose. She completely ignored the indignant and offended exclamation from Bernice to cup Rose’s cheek in her hand to draw her face toward her. “What’s happened, Rose? Are you alright?”

“She is not,” Leela answered gruffly. She spared a glance toward Braxiatel, whose eyes were wide with horror to the scene below. “Rose has lost her child.” She looked down to the three figures in the crater below. “And her nephew grieves their loss.”

“Nephew?” Romana breathed out with a light choke in her voice. Her head shot up to her old friend. “As in…?”

“Your son, Romana,” she confirmed flatly. “Yes. But do not be concerned as he is unhurt.”

Romana kept her hands on Rose’s shoulder as she drew to a stand to look down into the crater. “But … how?”

“Stay where you are, My Lady,” Braxiatel ordered. “I will deal with the situation down there.” The firmness in his tone and the lack of waver stating beyond all doubt that he knew of not only the existence of a son, but that said son was here, in this timeline. 

Romana turned toward him; her eyes darkened in anger. “You _knew_?” she accused him. “You knew that what we are facing here, that the two CIA agents on your asteroid, were family?”

“Hardly an appropriate time for this discussion, Romana,” he huffed. “But, yes. I was aware. Now if you will excuse me…”

“Did that the day I met you,” Bernice chuckled under her breath. Her eyes flashed guiltily, and she held up her hands in surrender when she received glares from both Romana and Braxiatel. “Poor timing. Yeah. Got it. Know your audience.”

Romana snatched a look back to Braxiatel. “When were you planning to tell me, Brax?”

“I wasn’t,” he answered with a lift in his chin, an expression of arrogance in the tilt of his head. “Now again, do excuse me.”

“I will not!” Romana growled as he walked away from her. “Braxiatel, you will not walk away from me.”

He didn’t bother to look back at her, but he did wave a hand to let her know he’d heard her demand and was simply choosing to ignore her. He was more than fairly certain that Romana wouldn’t follow. While her Lady President was typically not at all opposed to rolling up her sleeves and getting her hands dirty, this particular circumstance was a temporally dangerous one. Romana was less inclined to step inside a paradoxical bubble.

He was quite obviously displeased as his leather-soled shoes slipped in the loose soil, and the cuffs of his perfectly tailored trousers darkened with soot and dust.

“Well, I must say this is a fine mess you’ve found yourself in, isn’t it?” he said with obvious disappointment in his voice.

Jason was still on his rump in the dirt. He looked up to his father with tear-filled eyes of utter devastation and heartbreak. He held his cousin against his chest and rocked backward and forward. “Help him, Dad,” he pleaded. “Please help him.”

He stood tall over the two men with a light scowl on his face. “I am quite sure that he will regenerate if he has that ability,” he answered somewhat coolly. He looked to the side, to where the alternate version of his brother writhed and moaned in the dirt. “As I suspect he will as well.”

“I don’t think he knows how,” Jason pleaded. He shook the limp body in his arms. “C’mon, Jamie. Regenerate. Please.” He looked up tearfully. “Father, please. I ask nothing of you, ever. Please just help me out here.”

Braxiatel puckered his lips and twisted the pucker toward one side of his mouth. He looked down at the pair and their undignified pile on the ground and gave the smallest shake in his head. “Fine,” he murmured as he undid a button on his blazer to flick the sides open for a comfortable crouch at their side. “His first, I take it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. It was quite clear that this young man was still inside his first incarnation. “How long has he been … _well_ … exhausted of this incarnation?”

“I don’t know,” Jason answered with a shake in his head. “Five, ten minutes, maybe?”

“Ahh,” he breathed out as he settled into his crouch and looked over his nephew’s limp form. He covered his jaw in the cup of his hand. “Unable to trigger on his own, then.” He scanned up and down Jamie’s length with a slow rake of his eyes and hummed out slowly. “Unable, or chose not to? Which is the conundrum of triage in this case.”

“Probably chose not to,” Jason conceded softly. “He’s never gotten over Tonzarina’s death. Probably wants to join her in the Matrix.” He sniffed. “Selfish little tafelshrew that he is.” He shook the body again. “You hear that, James? You hear me? You _selfish_ bastard! You really want to tear your dad’s hearts out of his chest like this? Take mine as well while you’re at it?”

“Emotional,” Braxiatel said with a sigh. “And blinded by it, just like his father.”

“You have no idea,” Jason admitted.

Braxiatel let out a light huff through his nose and pressed his lips together in thought. “Well, we can’t have that, now, can we? He needs to live on and suffer a Time Lord’s complicated life just like the rest of us.” At his side, he started to vigorously shake his right hand. An inhale and he gave a firm nod of his head. “Okay, Jason. Release him,” he ordered firmly. “Get back a good distance if you will, please?”

Jason did as his father requested, and although having been quite rough with his cousin over the past few moments, was very tender and careful in placing Jamie’s body on the ground to slide out from underneath him. He looked at the shake in Braxiatel’s hand that had now moved to a shake in his entire arm. “What are you doing?”

“Violating yet another temporal law,” he said with a low groan. “And quite possibly further upsetting your mother – if that is at all possible right at this juncture.” His flicked his eyes toward the crater’s edge at Romana watching with an unreadable expression on her face. Oh, but he knew _that_ look far too well. “She is rather incensed at me right now.” He looked back to his son as he felt a tingle of warmth fill his fingertips. “A little further back if you will.”

He moved backward on his hands and knees and looked to his father’s hand, which shimmered and rippled with amber energy. His eyes widened and he looked to Braxiatel’s hand with horror. “Father? What are you doing?”

“Helping him,” he answered flatly. “As you requested I do.” The heat in his fingers shifted into his arm. With a wince and a huff, he hurriedly shrugged off his blazer and tossed it without care off to one side. His entire hand was now engulfed in amber energy that sloughed and dripped like molten steel from his fingertips. He lifted his head with a wince at the horrified call of his name from the edge of the crater. “Not now, Romana,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “I’m trying to save my nephew.”

Jason remained on his hands and knees. His eyes were wide with both wonder and horror at what he was witnessing. “Are you giving him a regeneration?”

Braxiatel looked completely taken back by that question. “Oh, Rassilon no,” he answered quickly. “Nothing that extreme. Just offering him a small, oh how should I say it? A _jumpstart_ for him to initiate his own regeneration.” He swept the fingers of his other hand in the air toward Jason. “Now, a little further back, please.”

Once satisfied that Jason had backed up enough to stay out of the full blast of regeneration, Braxiatel took a look at his flaming hand. He wore a wince on a face contorted by the moving light of regeneration fire and maintained that wince when he turned toward James. He grunted through the grit of his teeth and thrust his hand down onto the young man’s chest with the same violent strike as if he held a syringe of adrenaline or Narcan in his fingers.

“Come on,” he growled out. “You’re not dying on my watch, young Lord. Not here. Not on my planet.” He pressed his other hand into the burned soil at Jamie’s side to press yet harder against his chest. The amber energy glowed hot against his chest and burned brightly enough that Braxiatel was forced to look away.

There was a jerk in his shoulders and a gasp of breath from the young man, but very little else in the way of life. 

“You _will_ regenerate, Jamesthinducapiro,” he demanded harshly. “Do you hear me? Reach inside yourself and find your will to regenerate.” His lip curled and he leaned down low to snarl into his face. “When your mother arrives here tomorrow; when she returns to you after a decade away, I will _not_ be telling her that her precious and deeply beloved boy died during her absence.”

“His mother,” the Doctor croaked at his side. And it was a croak. He had no voice at all to speak. “She is alive?”

Braxiatel had no real inclination to look toward the alternate version of his brother, but he did so. There was accusation in his glare. “His mother, and my son’s mother, are _indeed_ alive. Very much so.”

“He thinks she’s dead,” he croaked back. “Rose _and_ Romana.”

“Well, he’s wrong,” Braxiatel muttered as the hand he held against Jamie’s chest curled into a fist. “And I will not tell her that her son died at the hands of his _father_. Alternate version or not, it will destroy her.” He breathed out hard. “My understanding is that she becomes very important to me in my future and so in respect to my future selves, I will not allow that to happen to her during my reign as _Irving Braxiatel_.” He lifted his fist and pounded it down hard on Jamie’s chest. “So, you will listen to your _uncle_ , do as I demand, and regenerate, you insolent and stubborn little fool!”

“Get out of the way,” the Doctor ordered harshly.

“Just like him,” he seethed at James, not registering the croaking demand of the Doctor. “You’re just like him, aren’t you? Fight me till the damn end of all eternity like the bullheaded woprat that he is.”

A large fist, bright with fire of regeneration, collided hard with Braxiatel’s shoulder. A second glowing hand grabbed at the back of his blue Oxford shirt to haul him backward. He didn’t simply stumble backward, though. Braxiatel was thrown backward. His feet left the ground a food six inches, and he fell hard onto his backside at least six feet from Jamie’s side.

“What are you doing?” he growled out hotly. In his peripheral, he could see sudden movement from the top of the crater. The women up there were now on the move, and he knew that Leela would be heading up that rather dangerous pack.

The Doctor stood above his brother, his chest heaving and his shoulders hunched. Though burned beyond any absolute recognition, and his face hidden inside the bright flames of regeneration, Braxiatel could see the determined scowl that was the trademark of a Lungbarrow-loomed Time Lord. He shuffled backward just an inch with legitimate fear toward the man that stood tall over him – so tall and imposing despite being at least three inches shorter than him. 

“Thete,” he ventured with a voice laced with concern and worry as he drew up to his knees. A man in penitent position ready to repent any and all sins. “Please. Let me save him. For the love of Rassilon, let me save your son.” He gestured to Jamie with a hard just of his arm. “He’s innocent. But we both know that I’m not. So, kill me.” He pounded at his chest with both hands. “Burn _me_ from the timeline, not him.” He held open his arms, wincing at the way Romana called out for him to stop. “I’m right here, Thete. Take me instead.”

The Doctor’s eyes flared wide behind the fire of regeneration. His fists clenched tightly at his side and his teeth grit tightly together. The croak that was his voice broke through the whoosh of regeneration fire. “The final act of a hired killer,” he seethed through his gritted teeth. “Will be to bring life…”

With a twist in his trunk as his face and arms became fully engulfed in the flames of regeneration, the Doctor leaned forward in a deep lean. He let out a forced cry and punched both arms forward to thrust as much of his energy toward the silent figure on the ground.

Braxiatel covered his eyes with his forearm and rolled backward away from the light of the fires engulfing two men. He felt Romana’s hands come down onto his shoulders and slide around his chest to pull him against hers. Her hold on him was tight, and the syllables she panted against his ear were filled with light chiding about how dare he offer his life like that. He lightly held onto the arm she held around his shoulders and dropped his arm to watch with horror etched into his face as the bright fire of regeneration bled and crackled mere feet away from him.

Across the other side of the fire, Rose struggled to escape the hold of a now sobered and very determined Jason. His arms were far stronger than they looked to be, and despite the violence of her fight, he didn’t relent. Braxiatel could see the reflection of the regeneration fires inside her eyes. So hot and so bright that he could have been forgiven for thinking that she, herself, was glowing from within. Jason spoke through his teeth against her ear, and while he couldn’t make out the words through unmoving lips, he knew the words were demands for calm.

He heard a hard demand from Romana over his head. It was an odd demand for her to make, one that ordered Jason to – for the sake of Omega and for all of them – to keep Rose calm.

He didn’t understand a single iota of what was actually happening, though. His eyes were focused on the alternative version of his annoying little brother, and the energy he was siphoning toward his son.

In a short moment – despite how long it felt – the sizzling, popping, whoofing and heat petered out toward silence and cool. The Doctor swayed in place, his breath haggard and his stance unsteady. He tilted to one side and fell onto a knee, the other leg spayed out and straight to the side. There was a broken, and dual-layered tone to his voice when he finally managed to speak.

“Rassilon. I hope that worked.” He looked toward Braxiatel; seated in the dirt with Romana so protectively wrapped around him from behind, then he looked toward Rose. She had stopped struggling against her own captor and stared at him with an expression of terror in her eyes. Eyes that didn’t believe any of what they were seeing.

Ahh, yes. Aborted regeneration. He imagined he must look quite the sight halted between incarnations. His eyes shifted toward the young man in the crater, and the clean new face he wore that was full of colour: Wild chestnut curls, dark brows, a deep cupid’s bow atop parted, full lips. After a deep and gasping breath, Jamie’s eyes shot open to reveal wide and smokey blue eyes. He flew upward into a seat, gasping and fighting for breath that came far too hard and fast.

“Good,” the Doctor managed to eke out as he fell to his other knee, and then to his hands in the dirt. “I… It worked. He’ll be okay, now.”

Darkness moved upon him in a slow manner, much like a slow sunset down along the horizon. As he felt death’s grip take hold, he let his eyes linger on the young man he wished he’d been able to get to know just a little bit better. Alas, it wasn’t to be. As his eyes finally fell closed as his final breath drew he heard the hard patter of running feet. Hands touched at his aching chest. Lips grazed against his burning ear, and he felt the tender brush of truly familial minds against his…

…And for the first and the very last time in all of his lives, the Doctor felt truly whole.

~~oooOOOooo~~


	60. Sarah and Cass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah and Cassandra return to the Collection from their dig site off planet...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two parts I hate about any chapter ... starting them, and finishing them. I'm no good at figuring out how to do either...
> 
> Trying to end this one completely stumped me... Oh well... I got there in the end, right? (pun-city!)
> 
> I hope you enjoy this one...

~~oooOOOooo~~

Rose Tyler sipped at a hot coffee from a thermal mug and watched the first rays of morning kiss the very edges of the horizon ahead of her. The chipper and melodic calls of songbirds danced across dewy grasses that lent her nose that soft scent of early morning that made her close her eyes, draw in a deep inhale, and imagine rebirth and restoration of a new day filled with wonders…

…And speaking of rebirth.

She looked down to the softly murmuring, unconscious young man who slept against her thigh. Although barely conscious when they arrived back at the collection from the crater pit, he had at least showered and changed into a fresh uniform before collapsing on the grass beside her, his head nestled on her lap as he likely did when a young child.

With her back pressed up against a carved marble bench behind her, she stroked tenderly at his hair, letting his curls circle around her fingers and watched his glittering amber breaths kiss at her trousers. Randomly, Rose would let a soft Gallifreyan lullaby fall from her lips. Jamie would let out a sleepy yet contented sigh and nestle his head deeper into her thigh.

“Men,” Leela said softly from her side. “They do not grow up at all, do they?”

Rose lifted her head up to look at the freshly showered Sevateem Warrior with a smile of agreement. “When they’re our babies, do we really want them to?”

Leela raked her fingers through her damp hair and stepped over the prone form of Jamie lying sideways on the grass to take a seat on the grass beside Rose. She handed her a fresh thermal mug filled with coffee, and drew back a long draw from her own. After a swallow, she smiled into her mug. “I admit this only to you, Rose. If I hear even a whisper of it from someone else, I will kill you…”

Rose chuckled knowingly.

“But I do agree with you.” Leela looked out toward the horizon. She straightened her back with pride. “I did wish for my sons to grow into men. To become all that I had raised them to be.” She looked toward the young man who was an identical image to the Doctor’s Eighth self, but with softness in his features that never quite existed within his father’s façade. She let her own fingertips reach out to tousle his curls. “But I can not deny how I do miss this. A child asleep at my side, head on my leg.”

“The vulnerability of them,” Rose breathed out with a light smile. “Their absolute trust that we will keep them safe till morning.”

“It is a joy lost to me so long ago.”

Rose looked toward her with a sly smile. She lightly bumped her shoulder with hers. “Then take a page from Romana’s book, and invite your mate’s seed to create another one.”

Leela lifted her head and laughed. “When you say it like that, Rose, you sound like one of them. One of these _Time Lords._ ”

Rose’s smile faltered. “When you say it like that, Leela. It makes me feel that you don’t like the Time Lords.”

“My Andred is a Time Lord,” Leela reminded her. “And so are my sons.” She drew back a sip of her coffee and swallowed as she looked back toward Rose. “It is not the Time Lord that I despise. It is the way that they lie and tell their mis-truths.” She looked back toward the horizon. “I lost my Andred because of lies. Because he was not honest…”

“But you forgave and moved past it.”

“Not really,” she admitted. “Moved on, but not forgiven or forgotten.” A smile stretched wide. “But it has made our love stronger. He is honest with me, and I with him.”

Rose puckered her lips with guilt and nodded. “Yes. And don’t think I don’t hear the accusation in your tone there, Leela.” She leaned against Leela’s shoulder, smiling at the way she leaned back against her. “The Doctor not knowing where we are.”

“Braxiatel’s _anger_ at the lie…”

Rose lifted her head. “Oh, it’s not a _lie_ ,” she sang out. “More we forgot to leave him a note on the fridge kind’ve thing.”

“Still a lie,” Leela said with a light sigh. “It was deliberate of you and Romana to keep this from him; from the Doctor.” She pulled up her knee to rest her wrist on it. “Which means you lie to them both.”

“Oh,” Rose sang out with false happiness in her tone. “But we wouldn’t have had quite as much fun with them here, would we?” she looked down at her sleeping son and stroked his hair around his ear. “But maybe Jamie would have left with the same face.”

“Do not think on what could have been,” Leela warned lightly. “A battle was won today. It might not have been so with other warriors in the battle.”

“Maybe not.”

“Be proud of your son today, Rose,” Leela said softly. “He was all that you and the Doctor would want him to be.”

“And I am,” Rose cooed gently. “I am so proud of him. And the Doctor?” She drew in a deep breath. “He would be so, so proud as well.”

“Then I am happy for you.”

Rose swallowed thickly. She stared across to the horizon, and to the slowly rising sun. “I need to tell you something, Leela.”

Leela turned toward her, expectation in her eyes. “And what is that?”

She drew in a deep breath. “I found out today, before all this happened.” She sniffed. “That I’m as much Time Lord as the Doctor, as Romana, and as Brax.”

A frown creased Leela’s brow. “And how is this?” She angled her head to one side with question. “You are human. Not Time Lord.”

“Not anymore,” she whispered with a light waver in her tone. With a sniff she looked down at the head on her thigh and stroked her son’s hair. “You weren’t in London when I was attacked by rogue CIA agents and nearly died.”

Leela’s eyes blew wide. “I did not know this! When did this happen?”

Rose turned to Leela. There was fear in her eyes. “Just before we all left London behind to move to Estrail.” She drew in a deep and long sniff. “I was cornered. I … I couldn’t reach Brax for him to help me.”

Leela curled her hand around Rose’s wrist. “You are safe now, Rose. Please find calm inside you.”

“I know,” Rose said with a nod of her head. “But it still scares me to think about what might have happened if the future versions of them hadn’t arrived…”

“Future who?” Leela queried.

“Brax, the Doctor,” she drew in a breath. “Narvin.” She looked up back toward the horizon. “Rassilon’s order, well it drew some nasty types out of the woodwork, you know. CIA agents looking for a quick buck, intergalactic bounty hunters, you know.” She saw Leela nod in her peripheral. “So they found me when I took the kids to school. I got hit, then shot.” Another deep inhale. “Brax, the Doctor, and Narvin showed up, but not before I was dyin’.”

“Oh, Rose…”

“Anyway,” she continued. “They took me back to Gallifrey – _their_ Gallifrey – to try and save me.” Her body gave a shudder. “I died three times on the way. Three times, Leela.”

“You are here now,” Leela reminded her. “Death was not ready for you.”

“I guess not,” she admitted with a drop of her chin to look downward. She swallowed. “But the only way they could save me was to … was to turn me into one of them.”

Leela’s eyes widened with absolute non-understanding toward how that would even be possible. “But how?”

“There’s this device they have,” Rose said softly. “The Chameleon Arch, they call it I think. It can change a Time Lord into any species of people they want.” She shrugged. “And a Human into one of them as well.”

“Time Lord trickery,” Leela murmured without the usual disdain inside her voice. “More of their lies.” She tightened her hand around Rose’s wrist. “But in this case, a lie that I can not say upsets me. You live, and you breathe.”

“Well,” Rose said with a light smile to one side of her mouth. “Yes, and no. No, because I’m alive and can watch my children grow. But yes, because…” She looked toward Leela with fear in her eyes. “But yes, because this changes who I am. Changes me completely.”

“And this upsets you,” Leela determined with a slow nod of her head. “To feel that you are not who you are.”

“Yeah.”

Leela released her firm grip to lightly stroke Rose’s arm. “You are you. And you will always be you,” she said with gentle lecture. “Two hearts or one. You are Rose, and Rose is you. Who you are is more than being a Human or a Time Lord.” She held her hand over her heart. “You are in here.” She then tapped at her temple. “And you are here.”

“I have to say,” Rose noted with a genuine smile. “That you’re taking this much better than I thought you would. Me? I …” She widened her eyes and looked down to her shoelaces. “I think my brain farted…”

“That is an image,” Leela said with wide eyes of her own.

“You know what I mean,” Rose continued with a chuckle.

“I am surprised,” Leela admitted. “That they told you that this was done to you.” She hooked her hair over her ear and looked back toward the horizon. “I would think this would be another one of their secrets. One you would not know until the very day that you changed like one of them.”

Rose pursed her lips, a question inside her mind about whether or not to let Leela know that the only reason she’d been told about this was because they were in a situation where is was going to be revealed to them all anyway. If it hadn’t been for her future wearing a different face, she’d still be in the dark about it…

…Admittedly, that did sting. It _was_ unacceptable.

Instead of admitting that and inviting potential Leela-ire, she merely tilted her head down to one side and exhaled slowly. “Maybe we’re getting through to them,” she said softly. “And they’re not so quick to have secrets and …”

Leela’s laugh cut off Rose’s sentence where it was. “Oh, Rose. That will never be the ways of Time Lords. Not even those who mean the most to us. Lies are inside their…” Her brow creased. “Oh, what is it that they call it? T.. TNA?”

Rose nodded with a smile. “So, we take the small victories then?”

“We shall take those that come.” She gave Rose a genuine smile. “Thank you, Rose, for telling me this. For being honest.” She looked to the gardens, and a small animal scarpering across the grasses in the hunt of its next meal. “It is refreshing.” She picked up a small pebble from the ground and narrowed an eye at the prey trying quite successfully to evade its hunter. A flick of her finger toward the animal, and the pebble shot from Leela’s finger. It struck target with precision, dropping it immediately. “Enjoy your meal,” she said to the hunter, barely larger than its prey. 

“Intervention, Leela?” Rose gasped with a laugh. “Really? How is _that_ a worthy kill for that dedicated hunter?”

Leela chuckled and shrugged. “There are times, Rose, when it is _good_ to have an easy hunt.”

“I guess,” she replied with a laugh. Her laughter petered out when a sleek black hover vehicle pulled up quietly in the carpark off to their side. Rose frowned that visitors would be arriving at the Collection at this hour of the morning, several hours before it was set to open to the public. “Who’s that?”

“I do not know,” Leela answered. She curled a hand around the handle of one of her blades and put her hand on Rose’s arm to ask her for calm. “Remain still and protect your son. If they are enemies of Braxiatel, then I will see to it that they do not reach their target.”

Rose nodded quickly. With a dip in her head, she gave her son’s shoulder a gentle shake. “Jamie. Wake up, baby. Come on.”

He moaned and spluttered just a little but rolled over instead of waking completely. “Another five minutes,” he pleaded as he lifted an arm up over his head to wrap it around her hip, his nose pressed into her belly. “So tired. Don’t wanna go to the Academy today, mama … Feel sick.”

Rose rolled her eyes with a light chuckle. “Completely out,” she said with a sigh. “I feel bad having to wake him, especially as he’s in a restorative sleep right now.”

“It is okay, Rose,” Leela assured her as she leaned forward to pull her knees in to shift into a low crouch. One hand was on the grass, the other held at her knife. “Leave this to me.”

Leela maintained her crouch and looked across the dim distance toward the carpark. It was a quiet vehicle that hovered with a light bounce and whirr of turbines. It settled down to the tarmac with a whuff and a downturn in the hum of turbines. The rear door opened and a young woman with light brown hair stepped down onto the curb. She waited a moment with her hand held toward another person in the vehicle. The second occupant took hold of the proffered hand and used the stability provided by that hold to exit the vehicle as well. It was another woman, this one with raven-black hair. She stepped onto the curb beside her friend. She didn’t release the hand that held hers as she leaned forward to speak to someone inside the vehicle. It was a brief moment of silent conversation, and in a second, she stood back to straight, closed the door, and pulled her hair from her face to watch the vehicle lift back into a hover and silently fly away.

“Who are they?” Rose queried quietly to Leela on guard at her side. “And why here so early?”

A clamour at the stairs of the collection caught both Leela and Rose’s attention. They flicked their hears, twisting their trunks to look over their shoulders, as Bernice fled down the marble stairs to greet them.

“Cass! Sarah!” she called out with excited, friendly greeting. “Oh, thank the Goddess, you made it safely.”

One of the women, the raven-haired lass, gave a laugh. It was a sing-song melodic sound of amusement that wove itself across the grasses. She held both the hand and the wrist of her partner as they walked toward the archaeologist. “You make it sound like we were headed into some kind of trouble.”

Bernice’s jog shifted into a swift walk as she met them at the entrance to the concourse. She slumped lightly and let out a long groan. “Oh, Sarah, if you had any idea what’s been going on here these past 24 hours, you wouldn’t wonder about that.” Her eyes were wide and she shook her head. “In-bloody-sanity, if you ask me.”

“Sounds like fun,” Cassandra said with a low chuckle. She looked across the gardens with a light tightness in her brow. “Everything looks like it’s in one piece.”

“You haven’t seen the rest of the grounds,” Bernice said with a long groan. She shook her head with wide and slow movements. Her eyes were wide with remembrance. “Revelations that will blow the both of your minds, and probably drive you to drink.”

“The good stuff?” Sarah asked with a wink in her eye. “Like Braxiatel-good?” She shifted a cheeky look upward into Cassandra’s face and wriggled against her arm while humming suggestively. “Maybe we can raid his office, steal the good brandy, have a few drinks. Lounge in his office and you can drunk-dial him again…”

Cassandra closed her eyes. “Please don’t,” she warned under her breath. “I don’t need to be reminded of that.”

“You really do, Cass,” Sarah said with a laugh. “For the rest of your life.” Her smile fell and her eyes widened lightly. “Or at least to the end of mine.”

“Which will be before full sunrise if you don’t stop,” she warned.

Bernice smirked and offered Sarah a look of intrigue. “A story that needs to be shared, I see.”

“Oh, yes,” she said with a laugh. “Songs need to be sung about it. Movies made. Fanfiction written. Fanart created.” She pulled away from Cassandra and was full of laughter as she raked her hands through her hair to pull it from her face. “It was brilliant, and Brax, oh, what a good sport he was about it,” she continued as she pulled her hair into a pony and used an elastic on her wrist to hold it back and in place. “Especially when she spluttered incoherently when he _actually_ answered his phone for once. Tried to pretend to be all business and all, but I don’t think he was fooled for a second.”

Cassandra looked tiredly toward Bernice. “You know how they say that you can choose your friends, but not your family?” She thumbed to Sarah. “I didn’t choose her, okay. Not at all. Can we be really clear on that?”

“Oh, you love me,” Sara sang. She chuckled. “But not as much as Bra—aaax.”

Casandra let out a long growl. “I hate coming here. I do,” she huffed. “Because this one turns into an adolescent. Mention once that I think Brax might be a bit fit, and…”

“Once?” Sarah barked out. ‘Once? Oh, please. The man calls and you immediately turn beet-red and be all, like: Oh, yes, Mr. Braxiatel. Of course, Mr. Braxiatel. As you desire, Mr. Braxiatel. Anything you want at all, it is my pleasure to do to you, Mr. Braxiatel.” She dramatically covered her eyes with her forearm and swooned. “Oh, may I call you _Irving_ , you gorgeous blue-eyed god…”

“Well,” Braxiatel’s voice boomed in with an amused chuckle from behind them. “Sarah, my dear. I was not aware that you felt that way about me.” There was a cheeky lift in his brow to greet her when she peeped and spun on the ball of her foot to face him. “But it’s good to know.”

“Mr. Braxiatel!” she spluttered out with horrified embarrassment. “What you, err, what I said…”

He took her hand in his and looked at her with a sparkle in his eye as he leaned forward and pressed a kiss against her knuckle. “And yes, you may absolutely call me Irving if that’s your desire.” 

She gulped as she swallowed down both her own embarrassment and the defensive urge to accuse him of being a flirt. “Ahh. Sure. Okay.”

He raised himself to his full height and slid his eyes toward the other woman. There was unusual warmth in his eyes when he smiled and tilted his head in greeting. “Cassandra. I must say that it is a pleasure to see you again. I trust your journey here was uneventful.”

“Very,” she replied with forced coolness and a glare toward her sister. She softened her stare to look back at him with a smile. “We both look forward to working with Bernice once more. Irqruks, as is my understanding.”

He hummed in an affirmative manner but didn’t quite answer that question. His eyes shifted toward Benny. “Bernice, can you tell me if you’ve seen Leela or Rose anywhere. Her Lady President is becoming concerned as to their whereabouts.”

“Really wouldn’t be,” Bernice said with a shrug. “Don’t really think anything around this rock would dare go up against Leela.” She looked toward Cassandra and Sarah. “A warrior of the Sevateem, if you can believe it.”

“No,” Sarah drawled, her eyes wide open with fascination. “Really?”

Cassandra laid an arm across her belly and held onto her elbow as she gestured with her hand in front of her. Braxiatel now all but ignored. “Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t one of their Goddesses named Leela?”

“Their greatest _warrior_ ,” Sarah corrected, all humour and teasing now out of her tone. Business and lecture took hold her of expression and posture. She gestured with her hand held upward, her fingers brought together around her thumb as if to indicate the tightening of information. “The texts say that Warrior Leela – the greatest warrior in the entire _history_ of the Sevateem - sacrificed her own life to save her tribe.” 

“You are correct,” Leela said with pride in her tone as she stepped out of the darkness to stand tall in the light afforded to them by the tall domed lights of the carpark. Her back was straight, her shoulders held with pride. One hand was set upon the handle of her blade, the other hung at her side. “I was named Leela in her honour.”

Sarah’s jaw dropped. “Oh. Oh, I want to do a paper on you,” she blustered in what could have been described as a shell-shocked fangirl moment. “I would love to get your insights, hear your tales, and publish a paper in all of the leading archaeological texts across the universe.”

“Real insight,” Cassandra agreed. “From a member of the tribe, rather than just via the whispered words and legends passed from ears to ears across the universe.” She looked toward Sarah with a serious expression. “Which are hardly ever accurate.” She smiled. “So, what do you say?”

“Leela!” Braxiatel said with flourish, and an odd look toward the three female archaeologists standing in a fascinated triangle filled with and intrigue and a thirst for knowledge. He looked back to Leela with a lift in both brows. “Have you seen Rose and James, by any chance?”

“They are both by the bench that you say was carved by Usco,” she answered. “James is still in a res … a resta…” She let out a frustrated sound. “Oh, Braxiatel. It is a word I do not know. He still _sleeps_ after his regeneration.”

“Restorative sleep, or coma,” Braxiatel offered in a clear voice of instruction. “To be expected after a regeneration such as what he experienced.” His eyes flicked briefly toward a gasp then silent but excited murmuring between the archaeologists. He could make out random words from the trio, mostly the scholarly repetition of the legends and textbook definitions that each of the had heard, but he attempted to ignore it. “If you would be so kind, can you have Rose and James meet me in my office? There is a rather important matter that needs to be discussed.”

“Yes, Braxiatel,” Leela agreed with a nod of her head. “I will assist Rose in waking her son.”

“Appreciated.” He looked at the three archaeologists and offered a light and polite tip of his head and a gesture of his hand toward the main building. “If you ladies will please follow me.” He smirked. “ _And_ Bernice….”

“Oh, very funny,” Bernice muttered with a forced smile and a pinch in her eye. She waved to Sarah and Cassandra to ask them both to follow. She looked to Braxiatel, who fell into stride at her side. “Do you have my Draconian Brandy?” she asked him with a lift in her shoulder and a smirk on her face. “I’d like to make sure we have at least one bottle before the ladies and I head to Irqruks for our dig.” She inhaled deeply. “A celebratory thing if you will.”

“Yes, Bernice,” he drawled long, the extension of her name an alert to oncoming bad news. “About that.”

She stopped short and grabbed his arm firmly. “Oh don’t you dare, Braxiatel,” she snarled. “I did as you asked me to. I babysat your Gallifreyan Princess’ friend…”

“Romana is Lady President,” he reminded her flatly. “Not a _princess_.”

“Princess or not,” she growled up into his tired looking face. “I did what you asked me to. We made a deal. That deal was: 2 bottles of Draconian Brandy – Vintage, the did at Irqruks, and the return of Cassandra and Sarah to my team.” 

“I know, but…”

“But nothing,” she snarled. “I kept my end of the deal, Brax. You need to keep yours.”

“Bernice.”

She flicked an angry finger up into his face. “Oh, you don’t _Bernice_ me, Brax, with all of your suave. Doesn’t work on me.” She looked him up and down. “ Immune to _those_ charms, let me tell you.”

Sarah poked her head around Bernice’s shoulder. “Me ‘n Cass were bought in a _deal_?”

“Oh it’s not like that,” Bernice shot back with a growl in her tone. “Make it sound so much more seedy and permanent than it is. I merely bargained to have the both of you put back on my team. That’s all.”

“Works for me,” she said with a shrug and a look toward Braxiatel. “Irving,” she said with light warning and a smile on her puckered lips. “I want to stay with Benny. Got to be honest. I hate working with Erharm, That guy is an absolute slimeball octopus-kind’ve handsy idiot that you should take off your payroll. _Immediately_.”

Braxiatel slid his eyes to her. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?”

“Yeah, pretty sure you heard me,” she murmured almost distractedly with a lowering volume as they passed an open crate from the field. Packing straw was strewn across the edges of crate and onto the wooden lid that was discarded to its side. “Swear me’n Cass have permanent bruised from… pinchy fingers…” Her eyes widened. “Oh my God! Is that from the Duphris site?” She squealed and skipped on the spot for a second. “Cass! It’s here!”

Both women shot past Bernice and Braxiatel, making the latter stumble backward a step.

“ _This_ ,” Bernice said with a growl. “This is why I need them on my site.” She pointed to the pair of women excitedly, but very carefully looking over their retrieved treasures. “Because of that. That excitement, that passion. It doesn’t exist anymore, and so all I end up with are complacent idiots with no respect at all for what we’re looking for.”

Braxiatel’s eyes were wide on both women. “I really couldn’t agree with you more,” he murmured. “I don’t want to lose them either.” He looked back to Bernice. “Since you, I haven’t met more well educated, knowledgeable, and brilliant archaeologists.” He drew in a deep breath and looked downward as his hands found his hips. “Of course, I now know just why that is, and where they obtained such intimate and intricate knowledge of just about every civilisation to have existed across the universe.” He kept his hands on his hips and looked upward. “I should have known. If it’s too good to be true, then it usually is.”

“What are you droning on about?” Bernice asked with clear frustration. 

“They,” he said with a hard gesture of his hand toward them. “Are not exactly who we thought they were.”

Bernice immediately stiffened at that. Her posture moved toward guardedness as her hand shifted to cover the handle of her weapon. “What do you mean by that? Are they criminals, Brax? Are we in danger?”

His eyes shot wide and his back straightened. “Oh. By the Gods, no. No. Not at all.” He flicked a look toward Sarah and Cassandra, then back to Bernice. “Very much the opposite, in fact.”

She exhaled a relieved breath. “Then what’s going on, Brax? Who are they?” 

“Time Lords,” he answered softly, underneath his breath. “Or Time _Ladies_ as it were.”

“Oh don’t be so bloody stupid,” she said in a dismissive manner. “They’re both human. Clearly human.”

He exhaled. “Which is the complication.” He folded his arms across his chest and lifted his chin to look across the apple of his cheek toward the two women. “Right now, indeed, they are human. A little trick employed by Time Lords and Ladies when they need to escape.. to _hide_ , if you will.” He drew in a breath. “Drastic, I will give you that, but when one of my people find themselves in a perilous enough situation, we are able to change one’s species in order to hide.” 

“I see,” Bernice drawled with obvious distrust. “And so you want me to believe that those two: Sarah and Cassandra. The Wonder Twins of the archaeology world, are really just a pair of once-up-a-time Time Ladies who thought they’d play a game of Hide and Go Seek by changing their entire species. Every single cell.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Don’t’ even try that bullshit on me, Brax. If you don’t want me working with them, then don’t.” She huffed. “I don’t know why I honestly believed that you’d actually honour your end of the bargain.”

“If we were not in this predicament, Bernice, then I would have,” he assured her. “But it is unfortunate that we are, and these two ladies have families to return to…” He looked toward them. “Grieving and heartbroken husbands.”

“Look,” Bernice said with a rub at her eyebrow with her thumb. “Just to humour you, I’ll play along. But do be assured that I think you are perfectly full of shit on this … so we are clear.”

“Of course.”

“So you say they’re in hiding?”

He nodded. “Yes. They are. From a rather violent and unfriendly species known as the _Ghaestreix_ _._ ” He winced. “They are a species that…”

She held up her hand. “Yeah. Familiar with them, thanks,” she said with a wince of her own. “Don’t ask how or why, but know that I am somewhat more than _acquainted_ with the _Ghaestreix.” She folded her arms across her chest. “But there haven’t been any of them around these parts, oh, in about a decade, at least.”_

_He nodded and gestured toward Sarah and Cassandra. “Around the same time that they arrived.”_

“Ahhh,” Bernice breathed out long with a somewhat pinched expression on her face. “Yes. They’re been here for at least that.” She pulled her hair behind her ear and looked back to the two women, both of whom now had small brushes in their hands and were cleaning off residual dust on the artifacts. “Do you know who they are?”

“I do,” he answered slowly. “And for that matter, Bernice. So do you.”

She let up a laugh. “The only Time Lords I know of are the Doctor, her Gallifreyan Highness, Rose…” She looked at him with accusation. “And apparently you as well, Brax. Something you didn’t quite think to mention to me.”

“It has hardly been relevant,” he muttered in reply. “You have always known exactly what you needed to know about me.”

“Because knowing that you are a self-righteous, self absorbed, selfish…”

“Oh really?” he huffed out. “There is far more to me than that, Bernice.”

“Yeah,” she said on an inhale. “But probably not something I needed to know, therefore I never knew it, right?”

“Ouch,” he drolled.

She gave him a one sided smile in reply that shifted opposite to the tile of her head. “So anyway. Who are they?”

He gestured toward Cassandra. “She is her Lady President Romana.” He then shifted a hand to gesture toward Sarah. “And that one, well. She’s Rose.” His eyes moved to Cassandra and locked on her with an unreadable expression. “My future wife and sister in law, respectively.”

“So, you marry the Princess?”

“Romana,” he corrected gently. “Who has held my hearts in her hands for centuries?” His eyes fell as a wash of reverence to the admission passed by them. His voice fell to a whisper. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

Bernice dipped her head to look into Braxiatel’s expression, and the far away look he had in his eyes. Her own eyes flared and her mouth gaped. “Oh by the Goddess. It’s true. It’s actually true?”

His eyes found focus and he looked toward her. “I’m sorry?”

“Braxiatel,” she said with a snort. “the Icicle himself, is actually and very much completely, in love.” Her brows lifted. “And with someone who isn’t himself.”

“Jest if you will,” he said with a low growl. “But yes. My hearts have been held by Romana for so long that I cannot recall a time when they beat on their own.”

“Excuse me, sorry,” Sarah interrupted. She held a hardened clay-like urn in her hand with a sharply designed geometric pattern on it. “But I have to point out something about this particular item that is quite…”

“Mum?”

Sarah looked toward the stunned male voice at the end of the corridor. A handsome young man in a smart and crisp black and white tunic and trouser set. His wide and smoky blue eyes seemed to be locked on hers and held an expression of complete and utter heartbreak within them.

“Uhm?” She kept her eyes on the man but leaned a little toward Bernice. “Ehm. Benny? Who is that, and why is he calling me…”

“Rassilon, Omega and the Other,” the young man hollered out sharply to cut off her question. “Mum! You’re alive!”

“I’m sorry? What?”

Braxiatel tried to quickly step in between Jamie and Sarah. He held up his hands. “James, wait. She’s not … at least not _yet_ …”

Jamie either didn’t hear his uncle, or simply chose to completely ignore him. He launched in between Braxiatel and scooped himself down in a slow stoop to curl his arms around Sarah’s waist. He lifted her quickly from the floor, walking a twirl in place as he held her high above his head, his face held out from her belly, looking up at her stunned expression with reverence in his eyes.

Sarah’s eyes were blown wide with shock and absolute confusion. But before she could issue any form of question or argument, the priceless and incredibly rare artifact in her hands was jostled from her hold. She let out a cry of absolute horror as she juggled the urn in both hands, but ultimately lost control of it. She yelped out in panic for the item to be saved and leaned fully across Jamie’s hold to try and do so.

Ready to fall over himself with the way she unbalanced them both, he thrust out an arm and caught the very edge of the urn before it could reach the ground and completely shatter.

“There,” he said with a smile. “Saved it. Guess it’s important, yeah?”

She wriggled out of his hold and snatched the urn from his hand. With a long stride backward, she held the urn tightly against her chest and looked at him with accusation that held no recognition toward him at all.

“It wouldn’t have needed to be saved if you hadn’t gotten all handsy with me there,” she snarled. Her sister stepped up beside her, and Sarah lengthened her self as tall as she could. She looked at him with a side-eyed glare. “Who are you? And who the hell do you think you are to put your hands on me like that?”

“Mum?” he answered with a pinch in his eyes. “It’s me. Your Son. Don’t you remember…?” A small wince creased up his face when she shook her head. “Right, yeah. I regenerated. Stupid…” He opened his arms and gave her a winning smile within his presentation. “It’s me. Jamie. Your youngest boy?” He saw no recognition at all for him, nor for the name. “Mum? Surely you remember…?”

“I – I have no idea who you are,” she answered him carefully. She held out her hand when he took a stride toward her. And walked backward toward where her sister watched with confusion and discomfort of her own. 

From the other side of the office, from another corridor, another young man dressed in an identical Black and white outfit hollered out a stunned cry of his own toward Cassandra. “Mother?”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	61. Found...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Braxiatel returns to Gallifrey to do something he'd been putting off for far too long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah. This chapter ... it didn't want to end... I didn't know WHERE to end it.... 
> 
> This is my offering that must hold you over for a few days.... I'm taking some time with the family and am therefore putting a ban on laptops for everyone during that time... This means that mine also must be shelved for a week as well - because as parent I have to be the, you know, the influence or something ... practice what I preach and all that..
> 
> I didn't cliffhanger too badly here... Promise. :)
> 
> I hope that you enjoy and that when I return in a few days I'm all recharged instead of vacation-stressed!

~~oooOOOOooo~~

The Presidential Office inside Gallifrey’s Capitol had a dusty, musty smell to it. Disused for the past several months, yet meticulously maintained by the cleaning staff, it was pristine in appearance. The plants that were strategically placed about were lush and well watered. The thin, glossy film that seemed to cover each and every leaf and bloom spoke of antibacterial, anti-pest oil application. There was nary even a small gnat flittering about. The small beverage fridge was filled with fresh juices and carbonated drinks, the fresher ones pushed to the back to make sure that the less-fresh beverages were consumed first. The ice-maker was mildew-free and full of thick, semi-opaque blocks of frozen water. There were even freshly cut, odorless blooms of pink, purple, blue, and yellow on a coffee table to the side of the room.

The only thing the cleaners had neglected were the air fresheners. The plug-in at the wall had dried out to a hard rock of odourless orange months ago. An unattended office, with inks, papers, and quietly humming electronics, didn’t exactly have the most pleasant of smells once the occupant returned.

If he had been capable of opening a window to let in some fresh air, Braxiatel would have done so. Long ago, the large glass panels of the Presidential Office had been sealed shut. A decision reached by the heads of the CIA and Chancellery Guard back when assassination attempts upon sitting Presidents was fashionable. Sealing the office with bullet and laser-proof glass panels had been considered a non invasive form of protection. It certainly didn’t detract from the view of the bustling city below, nor of the magnificent skies over Gallifrey. A President could stand at the centre of the window, proud and tall, a whiskey on the rocks in one hand, the other holding a lit cigar or merely resting inside a trouser pocket, and watch the magnificence of the Capitol.

Braxiatel had spent a long moment doing just that once he had returned to the office after months away. Although he had opted for an Earth scotch over a Southern Whiskey. The warmth of his draw as the alcohol slowly passed over his tongue toward the back of his throat was comforting in as much as he could be comforted right now.

He’d been recalled with a rather harsh order from the High Council. There were papers and orders that needed his signature. No sitting Chancellor to accept such duties on his behalf meant he had little choice but to answer the hypercube that had found its way to Estrail at the worst timing possible. His younger self was in an absolute and unreasonable fret over the very intentional _disappearance_ of his expectant mate and was taking it out on Thete’s wife in a rather spectacular argument of profanity that had shifted from telephone calls and into texts. His son and nephew were on a rather delicate retrieval assignment that he knew was very likely going to go pear shaped – for oh, so many reasons – and he wanted to be on Estrail for their return. He couldn’t rely on his brother to be there for them, that damn fool had teamed up with Carein to resume their hunt across the universe for their long-lost mates….

…Speaking of…

He looked toward his desk with a pain inside his chest. It was no longer neatly arranged with the piles of official papers as it had been upon his arrival an hour prior, a tantrum of rather epic proportions had seen to that. He often forgot about the full strength that his body could wield when fury took complete control of him. His desk was no longer seated in its usual position parallel to the window. It was skewed and angled in a very haphazard manner; shifted a good six feet from its original position. The framed photographs, the delicate and gilded pen set and calendar, and the papers inside the inbox trays were strewn and scattered with the force of the shove. The only item that seemed to remain in its original position of infernal mocking and indignance was the document that had sparked his fury in the first place: a presidential decree that would declare her Lady President Romanadvoratrelundar, the Lady Rose of the house of Sigma, and Coordinator Narvin of the CIA officially deceased in the eyes of Council. Signatures had been gathered from all members of council and were arranged in a uniformly columned manner on the bottom of the parchment. The only signature missing was his own. His seal had already been dutifully stamped by the Presidential secretary, and all that was needed now, was the flourish of penmanship that would seal and execute the document’s order.

He watched that piece of parchment, the off-white and more yellow shade of it, with eyes of disdain. His eyes remained on that paper as he drew his glass of scotch to his lips. The loud clink of ice shifting across the bottom let him know that he’d already drained the contents of the glass, and with a wince he walked toward a small trundle-table at the side of the room. He set the glass down on top of a silver-plated tray and picked up a long-necked decanter. He held the decanter in both hands up against his chest. His entire hand was cupped around the crystal stopper the plugged the decanter readied to pull at it, but he paused a moment … a very small moment … when he heard the whistling whizz of the automatic door to his office slide open.

He didn’t need to look toward the door to know who had walked in. He could feel the utter fury of the man clear across the room with the sizzling telepathic signature possessed only by a son of Ulysses.

“Thete,” he murmured in greeting as he drew in a long inhale and finally tightened his hand to pluck the silicone stopper of the decanter with a loud and hollow pop. “Drink?”

“Don’t do it,” the Doctor seethed from the doorway. “Whatever you do, Brax, whatever you think, don’t sign that order.”

Braxiatel blinked slowly and let out a long breath as he tilted the decanter to slosh the amber fluid down over ice. He had intended on only a three-fingered pour, but quickly reconsidered that to fill the glass completely.

“I don’t have a choice,” he answered softly. “High Council are insisting on it. They had vote and the majority decided that in order to preserve Gallifrey’s…”

“Oh, don’t give me that line of bullshit,” the Doctor interrupted with a growl as he finally stalked across the room to stand behind his brother. “Since when have you ever sided with Council?”

Braxiatel didn’t turn around to face the Doctor. He kept his eyes on an oil painting portait of Romana in all of her regal, presidential glory and lifted his glass to his lips. “I have _always_ been on the side of what is best for Gallifrey,” he replied. “Always.”

The Doctor’s voice was low, seething, and full of accusation. “And how is declaring your mate, mine, and even Narvin, doing what’s best for Gallifrey?”

Braxiatel snorted, then drew back a small sip of his scotch. “The fact you have to ask me that question shows me just why you were never a good fit for politics.”

“That hardly answers my question.”

Braxiatel turned around slowly. He laid one hand across his belly and pressed his elbow onto his hand to comfortably hold his glass in front of him. His voice was calm, controlled, and very bland. “The political structure of Gallifrey has been viewed as unstable in Romana’s absence. Our temporal power allies are starting to push council to firm up and strengthen the presidential office with the threat of exercising their options within the treaties to separate from the Temporal pacts that hold our trifecta of power…”

“I don’t have the time for this bullshit,” the Doctor snarled. “As you said: I am not a good fit for politics. I couldn’t care less what everyone else thinks.” He sniffed in hard. “I will not give up on them, Brax. They are not dead, they are out there, somewhere, lost in the universe…”

“It’s been ten years,” Braxiatel reminded him sharply. He pointed to the parchment still on his desk. “That should have been signed, their deaths declared, _three_ years ago.” He strode forward. “I held off on signing that at _your_ request, at _your_ assurance that our hearts were still somewhere out there and that you’d find them.”

“They are,” he breathed out vehemently. “And I will.”

“And how can you be so very sure of that, Thete?” He drew back a deep swig of the glass that burned hard at the back of his throat, enough for him to wince and hiss in a breath through his teeth. “We have used every single means possible to locate any sign of them with absolutely no success. I can’t keep this up, and for that matter, neither can you.”

He petted the space between his hearts. “They’re still beating, Brax. Both of them. My hearts are still beating inside my chest.”

“And as beautiful a sentiment as you are trying for, Thete, they _are_ going to beat. With or without the ones we love walking the land beside us, they will still _beat_.” He curled up a lip. “They have to in order for you to survive.” He lifted his head and expelled a long growl of frustration. “There are times, Brother, when fanciful notions have to give way to reality.”

“I won’t let you sign that decree,” he snarled in warning. “I won’t let you kill them.”

“They will be no more or no less alive by me signing that order than they would be if I held off for another three years.” He walked briskly toward his desk and slammed his glass onto the smooth, yet worn lacquered surface. With a low exhale he pressed his hands either side of his glass to lean down. “This is a legal decree only, Thete. Not an actual warrant for their deaths.”

“I know that,” he said low.

“Then what, really, is your problem?” he asked with a turn of his head to look back over his shoulder at him. “How does it really affect you and your belief that Rose and Romana are still out there if I sign this?”

The Doctor looked at the parchment that seemed to mock at him. He remained quiet as he considered his brother’s question.

“Tell me, Thete,” he half whispered as he looked back to the parchment. “Tell me what difference it makes to your belief that they’re still alive if I sign this decree.” He shifted his head back toward the shadow that his brother cast across the floor. “Convince me well enough, and I won’t sign this. Give me an actual, tangible, touchable piece of hope, and I’ll tear this up right now.”

“I can’t,” he said along an inaudible breath. “I just can’t.”

Braxiatel snatched a gilded pen from across the other side of the desk and rolled it in his fingers before clutching it to write. He had one hand pressed into the desktop, the other curled around his pen. “Then if you can’t, I have no choice.”

“Please don’t,” he pleaded. “I beg of you, Brax. Give me one more year. One more year to find them.”

“I’ve already given more time than I should,” he said with apology. “I have to sign this. If I don’t, I put Gallifrey back at the risk of war.” He shook his head. “And I can’t allow that to happen to our people simply because my hearts are broken inside my chest. Romana wouldn’t want that, and neither would Rose.” He drew in a breath and let his pen hover over the seal of the President. “Even you have to agree with that.”

There was no agreement from the Doctor. All Braxiatel heard in reply was the huff and whuff of his office door once more and the pad of feet walking away. He closed his eyes and raised his hand to press it’s butt to his forehead. The pen in his hand stuck into the front of his hair, and he was quite positive that he now had a blue line across his scalp. He couldn’t care about that, though. He had a job to do, and an office to protect. Romana wouldn’t have held out nearly as long as he had if the roles were reversed. She would have signed this decree on the first moment it was presented to her.

He hesitated once more with his pen shaking over the parchment. With a wet sigh and a shake in his breath he moved his hand to press it into the table top, the pen still captured inside his fingers. Tears rolled down his nose to drip off the very point of it with a hard little splash on the back of his hand.

“Gods, Romana,” he managed out with a pained whisper. “I miss you so much.”

A buzz of his phone on the desk captured his attention just briefly. He flicked his eyes toward it, face down on the desk. He drew in ha breath, shook his head, and chose to ignore the damn thing. He used the frustration he felt at the infernal piece of technology dancing in a buzz across his desk to pick up the pen and pull the parchment toward him. “Whoever it is,” he said with a snarl at the phone. “Leave a message. I very likely _won’t_ call you back.”

A song, a rather catchy tune that had been snatched from Rose Tyler’s iTunes playlist, called out happily from the device. It was the ring tone for his youngest son, the one currently out in the field on assignment. It wasn’t something to ignore. Braxiatel quickly dropped the pen and leaned across the desk to snatch the phone. He flipped it in one hand and drew in a calming, shuddering breath through his nose. A wipe at his eyes with his sleeve, and he touched at the green icon to answer the phone. As expected, his son was using the video feature rather than just audio…

… as always.

He cleared his throat and dared fake a smile when he saw his son’s face fill the screen. “Jason.”

“Father,” Jason replied with a light unsureness in his tone. “Do you have a moment?”

“A small one,” he answered with a roll in his shoulder as he walked around the desk to take a seat on the chair. His brow lifted to find that it had been upturned during his tantrum, and so he instead walked toward the couch, snatching his glass of whiskey along the way. “How did your assignment go? Were you and James successful? Did you retrieve the Time Lord we were looking for.”

Jason nodded slowly. “We did,” he answered. “Although not without incident. I’m afraid we aren’t bringing him back alive.” 

“I see,” he replied. “That is unfortunate.”

“James was forced to regenerate.” 

“I am very sorry to hear that.” He closed his eyes. “I’ll inform his father about that as soon as I end this call.” Oh, just another bit of wonderful bad news to further piss off the Oncoming Storm.

Jason exhaled. “It might have been nice of you to be a little more upfront and honest about who it was we were looking for. Particularly given the nature of the relationship he has toward Jamie and Tonzarina Rose.”

“The powers that be didn’t feel it particularly rele…”

“You are the power above them all,” he interrupted him sharply. “And it would have been nice,” he contineued. “To better prepare the both of us for it.”

“Indeed, and for that I do apologise,” he said with a light nod of his head. “However, it was deemed by the Celestial Intervention Agency to not completely disclose who he was, so that your cousin didn’t have adequate time to create one of his rather Doctor-Like plans of redemption over arrest…”

“Blindside him instead,” Jason snipped. “Yeah. Much better plan, Father. Much, much better.” He raked a hand though his hair. “Did you also happen to know that Mother, Leela, and Tonzarina Rose are here.” At the sharp inhale of his father he lifted a hand. “Earlier incarnations, of course. Mother is on her first expectancy, Tonzarina is still in her first incarnation.”

“Ahhhh,” he breathed out with realisation. “No, I did not.”

“Surprising,” he said curiously. “Considering _you_ are here as well. In your rather stoic and unfeeling first incarnation.”

Braxiatel’s brows pulled hard together. He couldn’t recall meeting Jason in his first incarnation – nor any of his earlier incarnations come to think of it. “Just where are you, exactly?”

“The Collection,” he answered with a sigh. “KS-159, before it was renamed for Mother.” He lifted a brow. “And when banners bearing your image were hung from the rafters.”

A lightly annoyed expression crossed his face. “Well, that certainly explains how Rose ended up with a snapshot of it to release upon the general public of Gallifrey in the rather grandiose manner that she did.” 

“Never get on her bad side when she has blackmail fodder,” Jason said with a laugh. “Figure you more than anyone should know that.”

“One would think so,” he agreed. “Alas, no. I always did hold a rather misguided sense of absolute trust in her that she would not betray me in manners so embarrassing.” He inhaled and shook himself. After a draw on his scotch and a wince at the swallow, he offered his son a smile. “Well. Job well done, Jason. Thank you for reaching out and touching base. I’ll make the necessary notifications and preparations for your return to Gallifrey. Will that be all?”

“No,” he managed in a somewhat conspiratorial manner. “Not quite.” Judging by the sound of shuffling and the shift of the camera, Jason was seeking a quiet spot. “Can you please come here?”

At the almost timid manner in which his son asked that question, and the obvious worry inside his voice, Braxiatel was already on his feet and moving to his office door. “Is everything okay?”

“I don’t know.”

He walked through his office door and into the night-dimmed hallways of the Capitol Dome. There was purpose in his stride as he headed toward the Capsule docks. “Are you in danger?”

“Physically? No,” he answered with a shake in his head. “Emotionally, however.” He swallowed thickly. “That remains to be seen.”

“James,” Braxiatel said with a knowing sound in his voice. “I imagine this was taxing on him.”

“Yeah, but it’s not that,” Jason admitted with softness in his voice to suggest he was trying not to be heard. “It’s something … else. And I don’t know what to do.”

Braxiatel didn’t slow his walk, in fact he only increased the speed of his march. “What is it?”

“Just get here, Dad,” he pleaded. “Please? I really don’t think that your younger self is equipped to deal with this.”

The unusual use of the familiar title worried Braxiatel enough that he felt it inside his hearts. “What is it, Jase? Tell me.”

“It’s Mum,” he said softly. “Dad. She’s here. Her, Tonzarina Rose, and Narvin.” He sniffed wetly, looking off to one side to make sure that he wasn’t being heard. “But. But something’s wrong, and you won’t talk to us about it…” He looked back to the camera. “…Me and Jamie, I mean.”

His hearts quickened inside his chest, which slowed his walk just slightly. He tried to gulp down the hope rising in his chest. “I’m on my way. Send me your temporal coordinates, and I’ll be right there.” He sped up to a jog along the corridor. “And whatever you do, don’t let your cousin call your uncle. Not yet, anyway.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

Jason closed the connection he had with his father, and quickly thumbed through the temporal location number sequence for their where and when to send via text message. He inhaled a deep breath as he lifted his phone and pressed the corner of it against his lip. He stared at the closed door to Braxiatel’s office, behind which were the younger incarnations of his parents and the two women his entire family had been searching for _for_ almost a decade.

“Did you reach your dad?” Jamie asked softly with a lean on the wall beside him.

Jason took his attention off the door to look toward his cousin. “How’d you know?”

Jamie held up his own phone. “Just tried reaching mine.”

Jason exhaled hard and slumped forward. “Dad told me to make sure that you didn’t…”

“Then he’ll be happy to know Dad didn’t answer,” Jamie said with a light huff. “And the only message I left him was to give him shit for not picking up when I called.”

“You didn’t tell him about…?” he gestured toward the office. 

“Not really a voicemail bit of news,” he said with a shrug. He folded his arms across his chest tightly and stared at the office door. “What do you think is wrong? Why don’t either of them remember us?” He lifted one arm to scratch at the back of his neck. “Amnesia?”

Jason pursed his lips. “Nope. If it was that easy, then a little tickle at the telepathic receptors would kick the memories back in.” He thumbed at his nose. “But Dad didn’t even bother trying.”

“Do you really want to call _that_ man your father?” Jamie said with a huff. “He’s got a rod so far up his arse that _that_ rod’s got a rod up his arse.”

“And so on, so forth,” Jason said with a smirk and a rounding twist of his wrist. “Like it or not, he’s still my Dad. Just got a ways to go till he’s been properly beaten into submission by Mum and Tonzarina.”

“Is he coming?”

Jason nodded. “Should be here any second. Pulled back a few minutes on the temporal Co-ords. Should have materialised before I even called him.” He looked up as a shadow fell over the two of them. He smiled with faux innocence toward his aunt. 

“Okay, what are the pair of you up to?” Rose queried with a light pinch in her eye.

“Nothing,” they both answered simultaneously.

She hummed with a pucker in her lips and a lift in her brows that told the both of them she didn’t believe their innocence for a second. “What temporal disaster have the two of you set in motion?”

“I don’t know what you’re implying,” Jason huffed indignantly. “I am a Time Lord, and therefore…”

“You’re Brax’s son,” Rose reminded him with a lift in her brow. 

“So?”

“It’s in your blood,” she said with a bop of her finger against the tip of his nose. She chuckled softly at the way his eyes crossed to look at the tip of her finger. 

“Why aren’t you in there?” Jamie jumped in with a harsh edge to his tone. “With those two?”

She made a sound of sheepishness and dipped her head as she tucked her hair behind her ear. “Oh. This really isn’t my … ehm … specialty.”

“Why not?” he asked. “You’re Time Lady.” He flicked his eyes to the office door. “And that’s _you_ in there, right?”

Her mouth fell open as she tried to consider just which way she should be expected to answer that question. “Well, ehm … You see…” Her head shot toward the door as it rumbled open with the sound of bearings along a rail. Braxiatel stepped out into the hallway, his hand over his chin in thought. “Maybe I should leave that answer to you father.”

“And what answer might that be?” another Braxiatel asked from the doorway to the office suite. Only a couple of years younger looking in this incarnation than the man who actually belonged in this time stream, and dressed in the finest cashmere-blended suit, he struck a powerful pose in front of the lights from the concourse outside. 

Rose spun in place, a beaming grin on her face. “Brax!” she called out with a lift in her arms up over her head and a wiggle of her fingers that invited a cuddle. “You’re here.”

“I’ve always been here,” the younger version of him groused with obvious displeasure in his tone as he watched the approach of a man he knew had at almost a thousand years of lives on him. He looked with a scowl toward the two CIA agents. “Which one of you felt the need to violate the laws of time to call ahead?”

“I did,” Jason answered with challenge in his eye.

He gave a firm glare in response. “And just what were you thinking inviting a paradox in this manner?”

“As Tonzarina pointed out,” Jason replied with a shrug. “I _am_ your son.”

The elder Braxiatel strode quickly across the floor toward Rose. Rather than immediately embrace her as she was so clearly requesting, he cupped her face in his hands and gave her a smile. “Hello Rose,” he greeted warmly before pressing a firm but chaste kiss against her mouth, then one to the tip of her nose, then a firm press of his lips against her brow. It was then, and with his lips against her brow that his arms circled her waist to draw her into a hug. He shifted his head to settle her face in the crook of his neck. “Are you okay?” he asked softly against her temple.

“As good as I can be, given the situation,” she answered with a long sigh. “It’s been a day.”

“I suspect it has been,” he said with a tight nod as he pulled out of the embrace and strode toward Jason and Jamie. “Boys,” he greeted with a light smile. 

“Dad.”

“Tonza.”

Braxiatel looked toward his younger self with an expressionless stare. Well, it was an attempt at non-expression. Hope was bubbling underneath the surface of him. “Irving,” he greeted coolly.

“Irving indeed,” the younger Braxiatel murmured. “Welcome to the Collection.”

“Yes,” he breathed out in reply with a look around him if only to be polite. “I do like what you’ve done with the place.” He drew in a breath. “Although it is a little too … _me_ … don’t you think?”

“Interesting that it never did seem to bother you until, when?” He narrowed his eyes. “When did you stop being less… well…?”

“Self centred?” He hummed in thought. “Oh, never really lost that urge. But I do tend to … at the very least … _try_ to be less so now that I’m a family man.” He folded his arms across his chest. “And speaking of. It’s my understanding that my wife is here.”

“Two of them, in fact,” the younger man answered. “Both of them far out of my own timeline. The Lady Romanadvoratrelundar violating the laws of time, will wonders never cease?”

The elder man quickly dropped the hold of his arms across his chest. The length of his face extended as well to openly display the heartbreak within. He quickly broke posture to walk toward the office, but found himself held back by the large and firm palm of his younger self. He looked toward him with pleading in his eyes. “Please. I need to see her.”

“There is…” he drew in a breath and released it slowly. “A complication. Unfortunately, me unleashing a heartsbroken husband on her is the furthest of what needs to be done right now.”

“And why is that?” Braxiatel queried with a pinch in his eye that warned of rising frustration within him. “What complication prevents me from greeting my wife?”

“Because right now, she’s _not_ your wife,” Braxiatel answered bluntly. His eyes flicked toward their son. “I expected that Jason might have had the common sense in foresight to properly advise you of that before inviting you here.”

“If I _understood_ it,” Jason snarled. “Then I might have.” He flicked a hand at him. “But as you rushed the pair of them into your office and shut the door behind you without any form of explanation, then I had nothing else to say to my father except: Get here, Dad, I need your help because younger you is being a woprat.”

The younger of the two Braxiatel’s narrowed a glare toward his elder self. “More like his uncle than his father, I see.”

“Very much his father’s son, thank you,” Braxiatel corrected him. He lifted his brows to attempt to soften his expression toward question. “What is happening with Romana and Rose? How have you determined that Romana is no longer my wife?”

Any annoyance the younger man had within him quickly faltered and shifted toward lecture. He drew in a deep breath and straightened himself up to full height. “It would seem that our wife and her companions found themselves in a spot of bother with a _Ghaestreix_ ship…”

Braxiatel’s eyes shot wide. He leaned forward just lightly with panic written across his face. “A what? Ghaestreix?” He took a half stride backward. “Oh for the love of Omega. How?”

“The details are in the capsule logs.” He gestured toward the front doors. “Which is parked outside if you are so inclined to do your research before we continue.”

“Do go on.”

“As a means of escape, it appears that Romana, Miss Tyler…”

“Rose,” elder Braxiatel corrected him. “Less detachment toward her if you don’t mind.”

The younger man’s eyes flashed with annoyance. “Yes. To continue: Romana, Rose, and Narvin used the Chameleon Arch as means to escape the Ghaestreix hunters.” He swallowed and drew in a deep breath. “Their capsule was badly damaged, but fortunately they were positioned close enough to this asteroid that they were able to land safely. Fortunate, as well, that they landed inside a timeline where I was here for an extended period rather than being on Gallifrey.” He paused for only long enough to draw in an inhale. “For the last decade, they’ve been working on behalf of the Collection.” He held up a hand when he saw that his elder self wanted to say something. “Until today I didn’t know their true identities. Had I been aware, I can assure you that you would have been advised as soon as it was safe to do so.”

“Of course,” Braxiatel replied. His eyes pinched just slightly. “And so now that we are all caught up, the issue of being Arched isn’t so much an issue at all. Simply have them open their respective bio-data storage units.”

“They have to want to,” he argued lightly, his arms finding their way across his chest in an indignant fold. “They have been in their Human forms for a decade now. It’s all they know about themselves. I hand them bio-data housing units and tell them to open up and have everything they know about themselves proven a lie…”

Elder Braxiatel lifted a brow. “What role do they have in the Collection?”

“Rose and Romana are archaeologists.”

Elder Braxiatel smirked just lightly at the thought of his two favourite ladies in the entire universe getting dusty and dirty on a dig site. “Simple solution to that particular quandary then,” he offered. “Archaeologists are a very curious … eagerly curious … species of people. Simply hand them the storage units and tell them that they have some form of archaeological importance. I promise you; they will open it without a second thought.”

“Bit of a manipulation, don’t you think?”

“Your name is _Irving Braxiatel_ ,” Brax reminded him with a lift in one brow. “Manipulation is nestled somewhere within the 20 syllables that make up the rest of our name…In _multiple_ languages.”

“Yes, very funny.” He exhaled. “And yes, I did consider that method, of course.” He drew in a breath and held it a second. “The conundrum, however, is the location of these storage units. Neither of the ladies have anything that would in any way resemble something that a capsule might give them.”

“That … is … disappointing,” Elder Braxiatel murmured slowly. “Without those bio-data receptacles, they can’t be returned to their original form.”

There was a slight ruckus from the front as the doors swung open and the sounds of arguing women skidded noisily across the linoleum floors.

“Ahh,” younger Braxiatel said with a light laugh. “That will be Bernice and Diana.”

“Diana?” the elder man queried with a curious look that pinched his eyes and creased his brow. 

“My assistant,” he answered with a light smirk.

“I don’t recall a Diana in the Collection. Least of all a secretary of personal assistant.”

Braxiatel smirked a genuine smile of amusement. “My dedicated assistant for ten years, Irving. How can you not remember?“

“Quite likely because we were forced to forget,” he replied with a huff. “Now, really. Can you please …” He paused and his eyes widened. A light chuckle shook at his shoulders. “Oh, please tell me it isn’t.” His brow then creased. “No. It isn’t. I distinctly remember Narvin being inside a male incarnation when he left Gallifrey with the ladies.”

“He regenerated during flight,’ Braxiatel offered with a smirk. The smirk fell quickly when Diana stumbled into the offices with a light shove against her back from Bernice. He offered a broad smile. “Bernice! Diana. How wonderful of you to join us.”

“Didn’t quite have a choice in that, did I?” Diana argued with a deep huff. She looked around the room to find several unrecognisable individuals milling about and generally making the place look untidy. Still dressed in her pyjamas, she straightened up tall and pulled her robe closed across her chest. “Mr. Braxiatel. Can I ask what is happening here, and what meeting I am not aware of is taking place?”

“Meeting of the Time Lords,” Elder Braxiatel answered with a deep bow of greeting. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Irv …”

“Lord Theta Sigma,” younger Braxiatel cut in quickly.

“Oh, I certainly hope not.” His elder muttered.

Braxiatel shot him a narrow glare as he walked past him. His gaze softened when he stepped in front of his assistant of ten years. “Diana.” He drew in a deep breath. “I am going to ask you something, and I need you to think very hard before you answer me.”

“Of course,” she answered with a light forward lean in her head. “What do you need, Sir?”

“I am looking for three rather, how should I say, insignificant items…” He put his hands on her shoulders. “A locket, a fob watch, or anything that might seem, well, slightly out of the ordinary.”

“It might have etchings on it,” the elder Braxiatel offered. “In the circular language of the Gallifreyan civilisation.” He snatched a piece of paper from a desk, a pen, and hurriedly scrawled a series of circular gylphs.” He then passed it to his younger self, who looked at the text with high brows that quickly fell toward annoyance.

“Oh, how very immature,” he muttered. He looked to Diana and held up the paper. “Yes, much like this, but with far different phrasing than is shown here.”

Diana took the paper with a snatch of long fingers and took her time to look over the text. Her eyes lifted toward Elder Braxiatel with annoyance, then shifted back toward the Braxiatel she knew and softened. “Yes. I am familiar with the language of the High Council and their Time Lords. I even understand much of it.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she admitted with a fast stride toward her cublicle. “When your boss is a Galifreyan with high standing in the Time Lord Council, it does pay to learn his native language.”

Bernice’s eyes flared. “You _knew_ he was Time Lord?”

“Yes,” Diana answered simply and with obviously shielded condescension in her voice. “You didn’t? I would say it was quite obvious. His brother is, after all, the renegade Time Lord known as the Doctor. Have you not had the opportunity to meet him? Delightful man, if not a little eccentric.”

“Yeah, of course,” Bernice said with a lift of her shoulders and chin. “Of course, I knew that. Met him, the Doctor. Lots of times. Plenty of times. Got drunk with him, even. And yeah, like you said: Obvious. Course I knew.” She looked toward Braxiatel with narrowed eyes as she clearly mouthed how much she hated this woman.

Diana returned to her boss and held open her palm. Nestled inside it were a trio of very small brass urns, none of them bigger than her thumb. “I believe this is what you’re looking for.” She closed her fist and turned it to hover atop Braxiatel’s much larger hand. “They’ve been on top of my filing cabinet since I started with the Collection,” she admitted ass he dropped them into his hand. “I’ve never thought too much about them, really. Just minor cheap trinkets I must have picked up on my travels before coming here.”

Braxiatel moved to stand beside his elder self. He cupped two of the small urns in his hand and held the other up to the fluorescent light above them. He admired it a moment. “Stunning craftmanship, don’t you think?”

Elder Braxiatel leaned in and looked upward. “Is that, indeed, what we’re looking for Irving?”

He breathed out a word of the affirmative as his hand curled around the small trinket he held into the light. “I can feel her in here. Romana.”

Elder Braxiatel held out his hand. “May I?” He watched the movement of the trinket as it moved from his younger self’s hand into his own. He closed his eyes and let out a long moan to feel the energy of his lost wife curl around his hand and tickle at his mind. “Oh, by the Gods,” he breathed with a definite falter in his posture. “I’d forgotten how incredible she feels inside my mind.”

Their head snapped their attention toward the office door of Braxiatel’s office as it was flung open hard enough that it rattled almost clear off the runner. Cassandra stalked out of the room, a growl and a hiss inside her voice.

“You are _insane_ ,” she snapped toward Romana. “Certifiably and undeniably.”

“Cassandra, wait,” Romana called after her as she walked into the main lobby, where it seemed an entire army of people were now gathered. “You must listen to me, please. I realise that it sounds sensational…”

“There is nothing sensational about it,” Cassandra shot back in reply. “Ludicrous, maybe, but in no way is it sensational.” She looked toward the door, where her sister hovered unsurely, her eyes wide and held down onto the carpet. “Come on, Sarah. We’re out of here.”

Sarah looked up. “But Cass…”

“But nothing, Sarah. We’re leaving.” She turned from the door, trying very hard not to look at any one of the people in the tight waiting area between offices. As her eyes found the elder Braxiatel, however, they paused their wander and widened with unsure recognition. The first two syllables of his given and hidden Gallifreyan name passed through her lips.

“This is impossible,” she breathed out with honest shock. Her hand flew up to cover her mouth. She spoke through her fingers in a voice barely audible. “You’re a _dream_. You’re not real.”

If he had been capable of voluntary movement, Braxiatel would have moved forward to greet her in the manner in which his beloved wife deserved. As it was, all he could do was drop to his knees in front of her and look up at her with a desperate and longing expression.

“Romana,” he managed out with a croak. “My beloved. It's you. You’re alive....”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	62. Coming Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cassandra, Sarah, and Diana have a decision to make

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. This chapter was written and rewritten no less than eight times. I've dumped off more than 30 pages of text, and many wasted hours worth of writing time.
> 
> I simply could not get it to work at all.... So this, rewrite #8 is what we have ended up with here. I can't do it anymore. I need to move on.... 
> 
> That said, this was the best option out of all of them, and so I do very much hope that you enjoy this.

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Cassandra felt her heart quicken inside her chest. At her feet, on her knees, was the face of the man who had haunted her dreams for almost the entire time she’d worked for the Collection. His name … or more a series of unintelligible syllables … swirled inside her mind. It was something that couldn’t be spoken out loud, she knew that. She felt the importance of holding that name deeply within her heart and her mind, but couldn’t help but recite the first two syllables. There was something somewhat comforting in that.

“That’s right,” he said with a smile of encouragement from his knees. He repeated the two syllables softly, then inside a whisper, recited the rest of his name to her. He was far less concerned about his name being heard than she was to say it. He lifted his hand to request that she take it. “You know who I am…”

“A dream,” she murmured with a shake in her head as she staggered a step backward, her eye on his hand looking at it as though it was a vicious snake. Her eyes shifted to his, deep and blue and swirling with the universe itself. “Stay away from me.”

“Romana, please…”

“My name is Cassandra,” she snarled out in reply. “ _Not_ Romana.” She pointed to the younger Romana standing beside the younger Braxiatel lingering in the doorway to his office. “ _That’s_ Romana, _She’s_ Romana. _I’m_ Cassandra.”

His eyes darkened just slightly. “You are Romanadvoratrelundar. The most remarkable and magnificent Time Lord to ever step foot on Gallifrey. You were Loomed in the very heart of the home of Heartshaven. You are the inheritor of the home of Dvora. You are the current and - Gods willing - the _eternal_ President of Gallifrey.” He drew himself up to a stand, looming high and proud in front of her. “You are my mate, my wife, my hearts, and the sole reason that I continue to exist at all in this universe.”

Cassandra continued to step backward, her head shaking very slowly.

“I would die for you,” he repeated as his back drew up yet straighter. “Destroy entire civilisations for you.”

“Would you just?”

“Yes,” he said firmly. “Anything for you. _Anything_.”

“But will you stay?” she asked with a pinch of confusion inside her brows as to why she would even ask a question like that. “Or will you run right when I need you the most?”

“I run when you need me to the most,” he said quietly. His eyes blinked slowly, recalling a very similar argument taking place between them only hours before Romana, Rose, and Narvin took off ten years ago. “I run to _protect_ you. And, Romana. Ten years ago. Ten years before now, I _had_ to leave. I had no choice.” He felt a sudden burn of eyes from the Time Lord version of his wife and battled to ignore it. “And, Romana, when you think about it: you did the same thing to me…” He swallowed. “I was gone a month; you’ve been gone ten years.”

“Don’t confuse me for her,” she snapped back. “I am Cassandra, _Not_ Romana.” She looked toward her sister, who was in a confused lean against the doorframe to their boss’ office. “Sarah, I think we should get out of here.”

Sarah’s eyes were locked on the carpet, but she nodded slowly. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.” She drew in a deep breath through her nose. “Just give me a minute, yeah?”

If Sarah’s tight focus upon the floor yielded any information of a less _fantastic_ nature, it was that the carpeting in the offices of the Braxiatel Collection certainly did require a thorough cleaning. There was a decent sized coffee stain near a cubicle that really should be tended to before it grew a life form and became a science experiment. Not necessarily a bad thing, of course, many items she’d carefully brushed silt and soil from over the past decade were the result of such neglect.

The elevated voice of her sister made her flinch. Unlike her sister, however, who was argumentative and incredulously disbelieving, she’d actually listened to the story told by both Braxiatel and Gallifrey’s Lady President with an odd sense of longing. 

While her archaeological adventures were certainly stirring and rather exciting in their own rather unique ways, it was also very lonely. Sure, they were often set amongst large teams of dust-stained and sunburned fellow archaeologists; and while the friendly comradery kept her heart beating and her mind active, she couldn’t help but feel so incredibly bereft at the lack of a true connection with another. She was nearing her fortieth year, and the only encounter she’d ever had with a man was a smooth-talking, blue-eyed, wild-haired and very gorgeous friend of Bernice’s during a dig on Felorian-3 a year ago. John Smith. And while that night was one of such immense and incredible majesty, she wouldn’t forget it any time soon, her hopes for finding a true love, to settle down, marry, and have a family diminished more and more by the day.

Cassandra had always given her a light smile, an affectionate pat on her shoulder, and told her that love was an overrated emotion, anyway. That their work out in the field was so much more important to the turn of the universe than finding a husband and squeezing out a couple of children ever could be. So enjoy the John Smiths of the universe when they popped by, but don’t think too much about settling with any of them.

Oh, but she wanted it, though. She wanted so much to love and be loved in return. She wanted the connection with another that she had in the life her mind created for her in her dreams. The nameless face that came to her almost nightly over the course of the last ten years with his manic smile, a glint of cheek in his eyes, and a devotion toward her that was almost overwhelming. In her dreams a man’s hearts beat for her, and hers for him. They ran, they laughed, they fought, and they made love underneath skies of navy blue littered with a billion stars overhead.

The life Romana had described was, well, sensational, to say the very least, but God, she wanted so much for it to be true. If this would be her only chance to have that kind of happiness in her life, then she wanted to take it. She wanted to take that opportunity inside both of her dust-stained and calloused hands and just…

…run.

The word hiccupped inside her mind and drew in a sharp tug of breath that lifted her chin to look toward her sister. Her heartbeat quickened and the longing within her intensified into desperation for this all to be true.

“What is his name?” she asked Romana softly, completely ignoring the huff from her sister at her side.

“Who?” Romana queried curiously. “Brax?”

Sarah’s brows pulled together and she gestured toward the younger Braxiatel with a flippant wave of her hand. “No, I know who Brax is,” she huffed out long. “He’s a bit of a hard one to miss, yeah? What, with the rather ostentatious self-signalling signage all over the Collection…”

Braxiatel let out a long growl of annoyance, lifting his eyes to the ceiling with a light shake in his head. “You all act like I’m the first to advertise in that manner, which I most certainly am not.”

“But no one does it quite like you do,” Sarah replied with a small and warm smile toward him.

“I would hope not,” he answered lightly with his own smile toward her. “Heavens forbid I walk the path already worn down by the feet of others.” He angled himself lightly to look past Romana to look a little more openly toward one of his most prized archaeologists. “But to answer your question, Sarah. I expect you’re seeking the name of the husband who mourns you.”

“I am,” she said softly. “If such a man truly exists.”

“You’ve actually met,” he revealed with a light upward tip of the very corners of his lips. “During the incursion on Alqueols when you and Cassandra were stationed there for the Shaizie site excavation.” He exhaled hard through his nose. “Not that I invited him, I might add. Gate crashing fool that he is, he sensed something was awry and sauntered in to do what he does best and destroy my dig site.”

Sarah’s head angled to one side and her eyes widened with remembrance. “We were almost killed on that dig,” she said with a gasp. “The artifacts we were digging up were hardly worth dying for.”

He seemed to ignore her comment and tapped at his lip. “Then there was the upset at Grecin, where he managed to completely upend the planet’s entire political structure, and for what? Because they were doing a little bit of mining where he felt they shouldn’t?”

“Turns out it was a sentient mountain,” Sarah reminded him breathily. “And they were killing it.”

He turned to face her fully. He set his hands on his hips and let his eyes pinch just slightly as he analysed her curiously. There seemed to me a moment of awareness within him, of a realisation he seemed upset he hadn’t come to before this. “Mohoill, Uphri, Thochins, the list goes on.” His head tilted to one side. “Any time the pair of you ended up in a timeline and on a planet that presented a potential threat toward either of you, he showed up.” His voice turned slightly breathy as realisation dawned completely. “How did I not work it out? How did it not dawn on me that he’d have his younger selves keep an eye on the both of you? I should have realised there was a reason for his excessive presence around the two of you.”

“He’s not _you_ ,” Romana warned Braxiatel with a look. “The only one who is fool enough to visit with his own past and futures is _you_. The Doctor would never flaunt his time travel abilities in the manner you do.”

Braxiatel lifted his chin and exhaled a sharp laugh. “Oh, my dear, Romana. Thete’s far more likely to behave in a manner most _Irving_ than any of us.” He gave her a sly smile. “He’s just a little more discrete about it than I am.”

“That’s a lie,” Romana huffed in reply. “If he knew that his wife had been working within your teams over this past decade, then he would not be grieving her loss as he is right now. He would have met us at our original materialisation point instead.” She drew in a breath and looked to him with challenge in her eyes. “As I suspect you would have had you known. This needn’t have happened.”

“Of course,” he vowed gently. He looked toward his elder self, and the defeated kneeling posture of him in front of a wife who seemed reluctant to accept him. “I would, most assuredly.”

Sarah’s eyes widened with shock. She dipped herself forward just slightly, cocking her head off to one side trying to look away from him, but not wanting to take her eyes from him either. “Sorry to interrupt you and all, but. Are you saying that the _Doctor_ – that crazy madman in a blue box; that rude and very obnoxious, arrogant, self-righteous technicoloured clown – is my _husband_?”

“That is precisely what I’m saying,” Braxiatel answered flatly. “And I concur with your incredulity at that revelation. It boggles my mind that someone quite clearly as brilliant as yourself would find herself mated to that fool.”

“Brax, please?” Romana pleaded softly.

“No,” Sarah huffed out. “No, he’s right. I’ve met him. Met this Doctor fellow and let me tell you this: I’d rather end up alone for the rest of my life than find fancy in a man who thinks himself superior toward everyone else like he does.” She strode to her sister and grabbed her by the sleeve. “C’mon, Cass. You’re right. These people are batshit crazy.” She looked toward Bernice with a scowl on her face. “Fuck waiting till tomorrow, let’s leave now. Much rather be dealing with sand in my underwear, spiders and scorpions sharing my sleeping bag, and a wolf at the bloody door than continue to listen to this bullshit.”

Diana clicked her tongue at the pair of them. “Don’t be so quick to rush to judgment on just one face of him,” she said calmly from her desk, where she sat on her rolling desk chair with her legs crossed delicately at the knee, her back perfectly straight as she analysed a small golden trinket in her hand. “You’ve encountered more than one incarnation of the Doctor, and if word from the dig at Felorian-3 Thirteen months ago is in any way accurate…” She lifted a pair of judgmental green eyes toward her. “Then you _certainly_ appreciated a secondary incarnation of him.”

Sarah looked toward her with a pinch in her eyes. “I don’t know what you _think_ you heard…”

“Oh I most definitely _heard_ ,” she countered quickly. “No thinking involved at all – least of all from you and Mr. Smith.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “How did you know about him?” she squeaked out.

“It’s my job to know these things,” she answered with a sigh. “To know the behaviours of Mr. Braxiatel’s archaeologists. It’s important that I am aware of all of the _activities_ you engage in.” She sniffed with a lift in her chin. “It makes my reassignment of your duties easier.”

Bernice’s eyes narrowed with irritation. “It was you who took them from my team, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” she answered flatly. “I felt that your influence – or should I say the influence of your visitors on your team – was not quite in line with the protocols of the Collection.” She shifted her eyes toward Sarah and then back to Bernice. “Your relationship with Mr. Braxiatel’s brother assured he would show up at another one of your dig sites sooner rather than never. I think we can both agree that we don’t need a repeat of…” she looked toward Sarah. “Of the non-archaeological activities of that evening.”

“One,” Bernice began with a lift of her finger. “I really don’t think either of them would agree with you that a repeat performance would be particularly unwanted. Trust me, _John Smith_ had no desire to leave the next morning. I had to throw his clothes at him and put my boot up his arse to get him to go…”

Sarah groaned and her face fell into her palm. “Benny, please.”

“No no,” she answered quickly with a wave of her hand. “Don’t let this smug bitch get one up on you here, all judgmental as she is.” She pointed back to Diana. “And what’s wrong with a bit of sexual relief inside a sleeping bag? Do you have any idea what it’s like out there; just how incredibly soul draining it can be to be surrounded by nothing but dust, rocks, bugs, heat, and tired, moaning archaeologists all wishing they’d chosen another career path because sometimes digging mindlessly in the dirt can really suck the life out of you?” She huffed and threw up her hands. “So, if a handsome stranger walks in, gets a bit of a fancy on, then what’s wrong with a couple of consenting adults having a bit of fun?” She drew in a deep breath. “Bloody Hell, give me a few drinks and a good-looking man like that, and I’d probably beat myself up if I didn’t try to have a go myself.”

“Bernice!” Braxiatel gasped out inside a booming voice of utter surprise. “Really!”

She didn’t look at him, but her arm swung around to point toward him. “You’re nowhere near good looking enough, Brax. Not even after a full bottle. So, don’t even think for a second that I’ve ever given it a thought.”

“I should be offended by that,” he said carefully. “And yet, all I feel is relief.”

Diana sighed deeply. “As much as I do enjoy the more crass aspects of our conversations, Ms. Summerfield.

“Bullshit.”

“Bullshit, indeed,” she said with a slow blink of her eyes. “But I think that you really need to re-target your focus on what I’m trying to illustrate here.” She shifted in her chair and leaned forward just slightly. “Sarah engaged in a rather intimate encounter with this _Mr. Smith_ ; A pseudonym the Doctor uses rather frequently.” 

Sarah’s shoulders fell and her jaw lengthened. “What?”

“Thereby we can assume that while Sarah was less appreciative of his technicolour phase of existence, she rather appreciated the Bronte-styled incarnation.” She waved a hand upward. “Ergo, the notion that she may agree to marry such a man in his future is not completely out of the realm of possibility.” 

Sarah twisted on her trunk to look at Braxiatel, the younger man, with wide eyes. “John Smith was your brother; the _Doctor_?”

“ _Is_ my brother,” Braxiatel corrected. “As much as I am loathe to admit it, yes. You know what they say: You can choose your friends, but not your family.” He lowered his head into his hand to rub at his brows. “And I cannot believe he engaged in such…” he finished only with a huff.

“Way to go, Dad,” Jamie cheered lightly with a chuckle.

Sarah’s eyes fell on the young man and she gagged out just slightly at the resemblance she could see in Jamie in relation to John Smith. She wavered lightly in place. “Oh. No … no, no, no. Just. No.” Her eyes pinched tightly together, the centre of her forehead pulling her brows in tightly. “It’s impossible,” she growled out as her hands came up in fists to press against her temples. “I’m not Rose. Not a Time Lord. I’m Sarah. Human…” she let out a cry through gritted teeth as she felt a lightning crack fire across the backs of her eyes. Faces and names filled her mind. Memories of a life she only lived inside her dreams broke hard across her consciousness. “Oh my head,” she moaned out with a lean forward as though she was ready to retch toward the ground. “It’s on fire.”

Cassandra leaned forward, worry blazened across her face. “Sare, you okay?”

“No,” she whined out in clear pain. “It hurts. It hurts so much.”

The younger Braxiatel pressed something into her palm. “Here, take one of these,” He urged firmly. “It’ll make you feel better, I promise. Just flick the lid and your pain will vanish.”

“Oh no you don’t,” Romana growled out in warning. She took Sarah’s wrist in hers, preventing her from inadvertently opening the small urn-like trinket. “By _choice_ , Braxiatel, not by manipulation.”

Braxiatel offered Romana a hooded look of annoyance. “Oh, you’ve heard their distrust and their arguments.” He gestured toward Sarah. “This one expresses disgust in the notion that she one day makes Thete her husband.” His voice lowered several decibels and he looked toward Sarah with a small smile. “Not that I can blame her at all.” He snapped a look back to Romana. “Do you honestly believe that either of them are going to open it by _choice_?” 

“I do,” she affirmed, her hand tightening around Sarah’s wrist.

He lifted his chin and exhaled a laugh toward the ceiling. “I’ve known you to be many things, My Lady,” he purred out with obvious amusement as he lowered his head again to look at her. “A _dreamer_ is not one of them.”

“Their choice,” she repeated with a pinch in her eyes and heat inside her voice.

He leaned down to bring his eyes level with hers. There was annoyance, frustration, and even warning in his eyes. “Give me three seconds with each one of them, and I guarantee you they’ll all open their biodata receptacles without waver or question.” One side of his mouth twisted up into a very dark smile. “Completely at their own choice.”

“There’s no need for that,” she said with a low sigh. “Just give me more time.”

“You have five more minutes,” he answered with a flat tone in his voice. He straightened up to his full height and kept his chin high as he looked down toward her. “If they are still opposed to the idea, then I _will_ step in and _make_ them see reason. This is drama I simply do not need right now.”

“Brax!” she gasped out with horror. “How could you even dare to suggest what I think you are?”

“My collection is open to the public in two hours, Romana,” he warned her coolly. “I will have staff arriving in half that time. I intend to have this issue resolved and out of my offices well within that time frame, am I understood?” 

Romana offered him a disappointed and very frustrated glare. “There are times, Braxiatel, when I do wonder just what I see in you that has my hearts stammer inside my chest like they do. Particularly when you show such remarkable unfeeling toward those around you.”

“Yes,” he drawled along a very long exhale. “And so, with your determination as to my diminished sense of care toward others, do excuse me.” He lowered his head to look through his brows along his pathway toward his office. “I have things to do.”

Romana watched him leave with a pinch in her eye. It was clear that he was unnerved and uncomfortable about this whole thing. Not that she could blame him at all, but would it kill him to be just a little more understanding and … She shook her head and looked upward, drawing in a deep breath through an open mouth. “Why is this so much more difficult than I thought it would be?”

“The Human condition,” the Elder Braxiatel offered lightly. “Back when I was him…” he gestured toward the closing office door to Braxiatel’s office with a lift of his chin. “… I didn’t truly understand them.”

“But does he have to be so uncaring?” Romana said sadly.

“Don’t mistake that for not caring,” he warned her. “Walking away from all of this means I’ve been impacted hard by all of this.” He shrugged and blew out a breath of discomfort. “I was simply not emotionally equipped to be able to deal with matters such as this.”

“Not really equipped now,” Jason said with a sniff. At his side, James agreed with a nod of his head and a hum in the back of his throat.

“More equipped now than I was back then,” he corrected quietly.

“Four minutes and thirty seconds,” Diana reminded coolly. “Whatever it is that Mr. Braxiatel wants you to do with these two ladies, you had better get to it.” She sniffed deeply. “He doesn’t tend to make empty threats.”

Romana looked in her direction. “Diana, is that your name?”

“It is,” she confirmed.

“This concerns you as well,” she informed her with a slow blink of her eyes. “There is a reason that you were forcibly dragged in here in your nightwear.”

“I see,” she breathed out with little to know actual doubt or disbelief in her tone. If anything, she seemed to pique up just slightly at the suggestion. “And who am I supposed to be, then?”

“To us, you’re known as Narvin,” she said with a tilt in her head. “You’re the Coordinator of the Celestial Intervention Agency.” She gestured toward Jason and Jamie. “Their boss.”

Diana thought on that for a brief moment. Her lips pursed out and she angled her head to one side. “And my relationship to Mr. Braxiatel?” she asked with a lift of her eyes. “In your world, am I his assistant, as well?”

“No,” Braxiatel said with a light smirk. “Your wife is.”

Her eyes immediately widened. “A _wife_?” she questioned. “I have a wife?”

“Magnificent creature as well,” Braxiatel offered with a one-sided smile that was genuine. “Your wedding was a rather grand affair held in the Southern Mountains of Gallifrey. Guests into the _thousands_ if I recall it correctly.” His smile stretched wide and he looked toward Rose. “Arranged by none other than Jackie Tyler, herself. Mountaineer Moonshine flowed abundantly, and your new wife proved she can definitely handle the liquor better than you can.” He drew in a breath and lifted his eyes with a smirk. “Of course, being a Southerner herself, I’m sure it’s in the genes.”

Diana rose quickly to a stand. She held out her hand and flicked her fingers. “Give me that trinket,” she demanded with urgency. “Give it to me and tell me what I need to do.”

Cassandra looked at her with a crease of incredulity across her cheeks and brow. “Don’t tell me you’re actually buying this nonsense.”

Diana’s hand was still held outward, and she turned her head to look toward Cassandra. “I am.”

“But…”

“Anything’s got to be better than this,” she groaned. “Being at the beck and call of him.” She gestured toward Braxiatel’s office. “And having to deal with some of the idiots that want to get a few moments of his time.” She drew in a deep breath. “None of you have any idea of what it’s like to try and control the life of a man like _him_.”

“Oh,” Romana and Rose both sang out together. “We do...”

Diana dared show a smile at them in reply. She then looked back to the pair of archaeologists. “What hard, really, could it do for you to open up whatever they want you to open? If it’s true, you return to the life you were supposed to lead. If it’s a lie, then you stay as you are, and the both of you head off to Irquk and resume your lives of digging for treasures that other people get the rewards for.”

Sarah looked up at her sister. Still in a light stoop as her head still swam incessantly, she really had to angle her head upward to look into Cassandra’s eyes. Her voice was somewhat strangled. “She’s right, you know.”

“I usually am,” Diana said with a sigh.

Cassandra closed her eyes and held them closed as she drew in a deep breath. She slowly opened them to look across at the man who claimed to be her husband. “Are we happy, Mr. Braxiatel?”

“Irving,” he corrected gently. “Please.”

She nodded. “Irving. Are we happy? Am I happy?” She looked down to her sister. “And is Sarah happy?” she looked back to him. “Because if we aren’t in your world. If we aren’t happy with you, with the Doctor, then…”

He stepped forward and held out his hand to her. In the centre of his palm sat a small and intricately designed little urn. “Hold my hand,” he asked her with a smile of encouragement and a dip of his eyes to the golden trinket. “Let your real self answer that question for you.”

With static, staggered movements of her arm, she slowly lifted it to cover his hand in hers. Her inhale was unsure and wavered. As her hand covered his and her palm touched the golden object in her hand, she felt her mind swell with an awareness that she wouldn’t imagine could be her own. Images of wide office windows overlooking orange-coloured skies, of red grasses and silver leaved trees swirled inside her head. She felt the warm winds of the mountains kiss at her hair and her cheeks as she stood amongst fields of lavender blooms spread around tall, magnificent white-barked trees. Tender lips pressed against her cheek, and she gazed upon the face of the man who loved her. His smile, and the shade of his eyes shifted into another face, and then another, from the image of the man who’d been for boss for the past ten years and through the faces that would lead to the one who held her hand now and pleaded for her to return to him. She loved this man, oh by the Gods above she loved him.

…And his love for her. His devotion and reverence toward her; it transcended all of space and time. She could see it in his eyes, and feel it inside her heart … hearts…

She gasped and snatched her hand away from his to draw it in between her breasts in a fist. There were tears in her eyes when she gazed up to his. “Irving,” she breathed out long.

“Yes, my hearts,” he answered hopefully. He held up his palm, the trinket still held inside. “Come home to me. Please, Romana. I _need_ you.” He petted his chest with his other hand. “They can’t beat without you.”

At their side, both Rose and Romana whimpered almost pathetically at his admission. Romana looked toward Cassandra with pleading inside her eyes. “Please, Cassandra.”

Cassandra nodded slowly. With a snatch of her hand, she took the urn from Braxiatel’s hand. Her smile was unsure, her eyes wet and scared. Her breath was just as unsure and frightened as she looked down to her sister. “Well?”

Sarah nodded slowly. “Together, yeah?”

“Together,” Cassandra said with a slow nod. She looked to Diana. “On three?”

Diana stroke toward the pair and held up her urn. There was an unsure, but very eager smile on her face. “By the Goddess, I hope they’re not having us on with this.”

“Me too,” Sarah admitted gently. She held up her own trinket and gulped. “So, errr. One?”

“Two,” Diana said.

“Three,” Cassandra finished.

The clicks of the three small urns sounded out in the room with a volume so much louder than seemed justified for such small little items. With the echoing click, the eyes and mouths of all three women flew open wide as a golden storm of brilliant energy engulfed their eyes and minds. The massive office space that surrounded them disappeared completely behind a triangle of thick golden walls that closed together with a violent and explosive force. They lifted their heads and exhaled agonised sounds as they each felt the shift and split within each and every one of their cells as the Time Lord biology warred against the Human. As the one thump inside their chests grew, stretched, and tore apart to become two, the three women pulled together into an amber embrace of power that drew them almost into one before propelling each of them in a violent and forceful shove to tear them apart. They were thrown from the storm surge of energy in opposite directions, each one of them colliding hard with whatever object dared stand in their way.

They each tumbled to the ground, faces to the floor, and retched in identical manners at the carpet.

Their skin still shimmered with slowly dissipating golden energy, and no one outside the trio of women dared move. Rose Tyler, standing close-to-touching against Romana’s shoulder gave a hard swallow. “D-Do you think it worked?” she asked in a whisper against Romana’s ear.

The answer came from the floor as Narvin lifted her head to glare toward Romana. “Just a reminder, My Lady President,” she snarled out with a pant on her breath. “I do intend on lodging a formal complaint about this when we return to Gallifrey, you can be sure of it.”

“Oh, shut up, Narvin,” Romana growled as she lifted up onto her hands and knees. She swatted her hands outward toward where Rose was struggling to get up onto her knees. “Rose?”

“I think I might join Narvin in that complaint, Romana,” Rose croaked out. She managed to roll onto her back and lifted an arm to point upward at the ceiling, then dropped her forearm heavily over her eyes to shield herself from the light above. “Course. Who we gonna complain to, yeah? The Lady President? Oh, wait, that’s you.”

Romana petted her shoulder and then lifted her head to look upward into the reddening eyes of her husband. “Irving,” she breathed out longingly as she slowly drew herself up to a stand. “I---” Her words cut off sharply as he shot forward to pull her tiny, aching body hard against his in an embrace so tight and possessive that it knocked the breath right out of her. As strong and fierce as his embrace was, there was a noticeable shudder inside his. He collapsed into deep, loud, and wracking sobs against her breast, the force of his sobbing shook and faltered his knees and in a slow movement the both of them collapsed into a messy heap on the ground.

The younger Rose pursed her lips and lifted her brows as she looked upon the scene playing out on the carpet ahead of them. “Guess that’s a yes, then…”

~~ooooOOOoooo~~


	63. No Idea What to Call this...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose isn't quite comfortable with seeing a different face...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is simply one of those chapters where nothing really moves along, but kind've lets the characters chat a little.
> 
> A set up chapter, if you will. I needed something specific in place... and this was how I needed to get there. One more chapter to get us back to Estrail - I promise.
> 
> (and I didn't have much writing time today, so I couldn't sink my teeth into anything really meaty like I actually wanted to)
> 
> Oh, in case noone really has a desire to read Narvin giving the snog of his/her life ... do be warned ... I'm pointing down and warning you: Narvin Snog below.

~~ooooOOOoooo~~

Rose Tyler, the younger version of the two that were in the offices of Braxiatel’s Collection, looked upon the scene ahead of her with eyes wide and her heart pounding inside her chest. While her heart was both shattered and singing for the reunion of Brax and Romana, it stumbled a bit at the image of her elder self still lying on her back with a forearm covering her eyes.

That was jarring to her. Jarring to say the very least. Sure, she was eager as all to make sure that her elder self did revert back to her Time Lady form to go back home to the Doctor, but now that the transition was complete, and the _crisis_ was now averted, Rose finally let the new face of her sink in a little…

…Well, what she could see of it right now, that is, seeing as her future had her forearm held across her eyes.

“I’m able to regenerate now,” she whispered underneath her breath. It was spoken only for the benefit of herself, but she felt the shift of Romana beside her.

“Rose?” Romana asked under her own breath, unwilling to say anything that may interrupt the reunion happening in front of them. “Are you alright?”

Rose drew in a very deep breath, held onto it, and nodded. She gestured toward the doorway. “Think I need some air. You okay to keep an eye on this lot?”

Romana nodded her head and gave Rose’s arm a supportive rub. “Of course. Please, be careful.”

Rose smiled. “Leela’s outside, I’ll be fine.”

“And just _what_ is she doing out there, again?”

Rose smiled lightly. “Procuring breakfast meat as is my understanding.”

Romana gave the slightest of winces to that. She dropped her forehead into her palm and rubbed at her brows with her fingers. “Oh dear. And we didn’t think to stop her?”

“Your attention was otherwise occupied,” she answered with a light chuckle. “And I think it was better that she be out on a hunt than having to witness any of this.”

“Understood,” Romana said with a nod. “I’ll meet you outside in a moment.”

Rose nodded and turned to slide open the door to Braxiatel’s office. She popped her head inside, drawing in her breath to see the way he was in a lean at his desk, his temple held in one hand, his elbow on the desk. His eyes were on papers spread across his desk, but he wasn’t really reading any of it. There was a faraway expression on his face.

“Brax?” she called softly.

He didn’t look up, instead he shifted his focus onto the papers as though they’d had the entirety of his attention since sitting down. “Yes, Rose?”

She stepped into the room and quietly closed the door behind her. She stepped back to press up against the door, her hands held behind her. “I’m going to head out now.”

“Good,” he muttered, still with eyes on the papers. “Safe travels. Try not to get into any trouble before you get home to safety.”

She chuckled lightly. “Safety doesn’t really seem to be part of the vernacular lately.”

“Such as I would expect the life of the wife of my brother to be,” he murmured lightly. “Or really anyone associated with him.” He finally lifted his head to look upon her with a somewhat forced expression of complete neutrality. “I do seem quite fond of you in our future,” he said with a light smile. “I expect we meet after a regeneration or two and I become less of an ..” he sighed deeply. “Less emotionally unavailable.”

Rose pushed off the door and approached his desk slowly. She walked around toward him and stood in front of his chair. Surprisingly, he turned his seat to face her, although he didn’t rise up to greet her. “I met _this_ you,” she said with a smile, placing both hands on his cheeks. “And I _love_ this you.” She leaned down to press a light and tender kiss against his mouth, surprised to feel the light touch of his hand to her hip and light pressure of his lips against hers and to return the affection. She smiled and lifted her chin to press her forehead against his brow. She touched the tip of her nose to his, looked into his blue eyes and blinked slowly. “You are my best friend, my rock, my protector, and someone I love very very deeply. Brax. If it wasn’t for you – _this_ you - I’d never be where I am today.”

“I somehow doubt that,” he remarked as she slowly rose back up to a stand. The affection in her eyes toward him was somewhat unnerving, but not entirely unwelcome. “People attribute far too much of who they become to my influence. In reality, however, I really have little to do with it.”

“In my case,” she said with a sad smile. “Circumstances arose where I … I…” She lifted her head and looked toward a painting on his wall. “That I don’t know I would have made it through without you and Romana.” She looked back at him. “You are very much the reason I am where I am.”

“Thank you,” he said with genuine gratitude in his voice. “It is good to know that I do have a redeeming quality or two inside this incarnation I seem stuck in.”

There was a buzz inside her pocket, and before she could get at it to silence the phone and ignore the call, Boney M’s Daddy Cool sang out its disco beat. Rose immediately groaned as she grasped the phone in her hand and pulled it out to look at the face of it. She exhaled hard. “Now, this version of you on the other hand… Not liking him very much right now.”

Braxiatel held out his hand. “Here. Let me handle him for you.” He rolled his eyes at the widening of alarm within hers at the suggestion. “Who better to handle an irate Irving Braxiatel than an equally annoyed Irving Braxiatel?” he finished his question with a curious hum.

Rose shrugged and handed the phone to him. “Yeah, why not? Have fun.” She watched as he took the phone and pressed the green button to accept it. “And are you really _that_ annoyed right now? I thought we were…”

He held up a finger to her and pressed the phone to his ear. “You’ve reached Irving Braxiatel of the Braxiatel Collection speaking on behalf of Lady Rose Tyler of the House of Lungbarrow,” he greeted somewhat flatly. “How may I be of assistance?” He paused and offered Rose a wink as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line. “Yes, indeed. Leela, Rose, and Romana are currently with me, and are quite safe at this moment, thank you.” He nodded slowly and leaned forward with both elbows on his desk. “Yes, it is quite clear that you’re unhappy about this, but do be assured that they are all….” His eyes flashed wide. “Oh. Well. _Really_.” After a moment he hummed out a sound, but he said absolutely nothing. He hummed again after another moment, and than again a moment later. Finally, after what must have been a good half minute, he drew in a breath. “I see, although that does not quite offer complete justification for the full range of fury you are unleashing upon her.” The way he looked up at Rose provided adequate warning to her that the Brax on the other end of the line had provided information that neither Romana nor Rose had offered him. His eyes then lifted upward and he exhaled a long sound. “Are you nearing the finish line any time soon?” He leaned back in his chair and spun it in a full circle to take him back to a lean of his forearms on the desk. “I think that we can both agree about something, Irving,” he said after a moment. “And that is that I have _zero_ reservations about heading forward along my timeline to kick you square in the arse should you continue to be such an unreasonable woprat.” He exhaled and dropped his forehead into his palm at the reply. “Wow.”

Rose held out her hand. “You know, it’s okay. You can give him to me…”

He shook his head and waved his hand at her mouthing that he was perfectly fine right now. With a sniff and a shake of his head, he pushed one hand into the desk to lever himself up to a stand and walked around the desk toward the door. “Please give me a moment,” he said with a sigh after another moment. He slid the door of his office partially open. “Bernice!”

Bernice turned to him with her brows high. “Yeah?”

He tossed the phone to her with a slow looping motion. At her startled look, he offered her a smile. “Don’t say I don’t do anything for you. Do have fun. You’re welcome.” He then closed the door and uttered a low chuckle as he took up a somewhat sentinel-type stance at Rose’s side. “Irving tells me that you – and very likely Romana are in the sightline of our Lord Rassilon, is this correct?”

Rose pursed out her lips and nodded slowly. “We are.”

“With Romana being my beloved and my hearts, and you – _it seems_ – being a rather important figure to him as well…” He looked toward her shoulder, then back to her face. “And with you still recovering from an ambush where you were almost lost to everyone: Me, Romana, Thete, and the children…I have to concur that his ire _is_ justified.”

She lifted her chin. “All you had to do, Brax, was answer your phone instead of nappin’ on the couch, and it wouldn’t have happened.” She flicked her fingers against his chest. “But you don’t like answering when I call, but you absolutely expect _me_ to answer when you call me or there’s hell to pay…”

“Tell you what,” he offered with a lean across his desk to slide a small white card from an artfully designed business card holder at the front of his desk. He leaned down over the desk, grabbed a pen, and hurriedly scrawled a series of numbers on the back of it. “This is my number, and the temporal coding that will send your call to the best earliest time to reach me along my timeline.” He held her hand and set the card into her palm. “Next time I don’t answer you and you truly need my assistance, call this number instead. I guarantee you I’ll answer.”

She looked at the card. “This is probably the same number you have now, though…”

He shook his head. “I make a number change for each new incarnation.” He lifted his head and lifted his cheeks in a light and guilty wince. “Makes it a little easier for me to reach forward – or backward – where necessary.”

She flipped the card to look at the front and the back. “Got another eleven sets for me, then?”

He tilted his head to one side. Curiosity danced within his eyes. “Do you not call for your own husband when things go awry for you?”

She drew in a deep breath through an open mouth. Her eyes were everywhere except on him. “Yeah. That’s … a long story.”

“Fair enough.”

“Anyway, thanks.” She put her arms around him in a tight hug that pressed her ear against the centre of his chest. She listened to the double-beat of his hearts for a moment and let out a small sigh. “I love you.”

“You understand that I cannot return your sentiment,” he breathed apologetically.

“I know I’m in your hearts,” she said with a smile as she pulled back and petted her fingers against each one of them. “Anyway, I’m gonna scoot. Thanks for … you know… putting up with the drama.”

“A pleasure.”

She slid open the door of his office and looked back at him with a twinkle in her eye. “Liar.”

“It’s what I do best.”

She wiggled her fingers and stepped through the doorway, pulling it to a silent close behind her. Romana was still beside the door, watching curiously as her elder self reconnected with her husband and son, and Rose cuddling her weeping, adult son, who looked to be struggling to reach someone by phone.

“Is he alright?” Romana asked gently, the _he_ inside her question not needing to be clarified at all.

Rose gestured toward Braxiatel’s office and let out a low breath. “Do me a favour, Romana? Talk to him before you go, yeah? He can hide it all he wants behind his arrogance and fake annoyance toward all the _drama_ …” She swallowed and shifted head in a sympathetic manner. “But we know him better than that. He’s upset. Doing that self recrimination thing he’s so good at when he’s moody because you two are having a row.”

“I was unkind,” Romana admitted with a nod of her head. “I know. I will speak with him.” She looked at Rose with tender eyes. “And you? Are you feeling any better?”

“Still trying to deal with it,” she admitted. Her eyes flashed to her elder self and then back to Romana. “I can’t look at her, you know?”

“Then go,” she breathed out with a flick of her fingers in a shoo motion. “Wait outside. I’ll make apologies and farewells on your behalf.”

Rose looked across to Bernice, who was in a slouch on a desk chair, her booted feet up on the desk, happily issuing snarks to Braxiatel on the phone. She seemed to be enjoying herself immensely. “Make sure you get my phone off her before you leave. Brax’ll throw a fit if I lose _another_ one.”

“Seems to me he’s already throwing one.” Her eyes widened as Bernice barked out a loud laugh from across the room. “Or maybe not.”

Rose smiled and slid her hands into her trouser pockets as she began a slow trek toward the front doors. The smile fell fairly quickly to a straight line as she thought back over the events of this particular girls-day-out with Romana and Leela. It was a definite rollercoaster of emotions for sure. If she was asked to describe how their day had gone, about the only way she figured she could describe it was to say: “Just another day as a Lungbarrow.”

All she wanted to do right now, though, was to get home, hold her children tightly against her chest, then spend the entire evening experiencing the very tender and pleasurable touch of her husband. Her eyes fell closed in a very slow blink as she strode forward and thought about him: Her pinstriped Doctor. Only a full day had passed by, but God, it felt like weeks.

She kept her head down and slowly opened her eyes, as a long puff of wind kissed at her face and blew at her hair. She couldn’t’ help but smile when she heard the key-on-piano-wire sound of the TARDIS materialising in the corner of the main lobby. She paused her forward gait and looked at the doors fondly as she ship fully materialised and huffed a breath of steam as she settled down and her engines went silent. At the creaking of the door, she watched the future of her husband step out into the lobby.

The Doctor clearly hadn’t set foot in the Collection – or at least it had been a long while since he had – as he looked upward and around him with an open-mouth smile of awe toward the surroundings.

“Hello Doctor,” she called out softly.

He stopped his spin to face her directly. “Rose…” His awe faltered just a moment, and the look of expectation faltered just slightly as he looked down at a device in his hand that looked to her like a pair of television remote controls had been spliced together and a red blinking light added to it. “Ahh. Calibration is a little off, then.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “My God, you’re good for a girl’s ego, aren’t you?” she said with amusement as she strode toward him. “Happy to see me, but at the same time you aren’t.”

His expression was one of true affection, and he kept his eyes on hers as she neared him. “I am _always_ happy to see you, Rose,” he vowed with a lift of his hand to touch his fingers to her jaw. “Always happy to see the woman my hearts beat for.” There was a pinch of longing in between his brows. “How could I not be?”

“I could snog you senseless for sayin’ that,” she said with a smile.

He opened his arms to her. “I won’t argue with that.”

She stepped forward and pressed her fingers against his chest, holding herself short of closing the distance to kiss him like his eyes were asking her to. “But there is someone through there,” she tipped her ear to the corridor toward the offices. “Who might want to snog you a little more than I do.”

That confused him, and he wasn’t shy to show that with a crease in his cheeks and brow. “I’m sorry, _what_?”

“Jamie’s been trying to reach you,” she said with a smile.

“Jamie, as in our son?” The expression of confusion shifted toward confusion and distaste. “Why would _he_ want to snog me?”

Her eyes flared with amusement. “No,” she said with a laugh. “No. God no. Not _him_. He’s just here, that’s all.”

The look of confusion didn’t falter, but the disgust fled. “Rose, how have you met James?”

“He and Jason were sent here by Brax,” she answered. “They had a … she swallowed hard and tried to keep her features as neutral as possible. “Criminal they had to deal with.”

He knew this face well enough that it was easy for him to see that she’d made a rather pained omission. “Are you okay?”

“Always okay,” she said with a press-lipped smile. She gestured toward the corridor. “Anyway, best you go now. The last thing I want is to have me be the one to have to come find you when I’m the one that’s been missing for ten years.”

Any and all expression fled his face, then again, so did all its colour. His voice was little more than a breath. “What do you mean?”

A smile stretched across her face. Behind her, the breeze kicked up at the imminent arrival of yet another Gallifreyan capsule. She turned to look over her shoulders and smiled widely at the materialising capsule, this one bearing the black and white markings of the Celestial Intervention Agency. 

“I guess Narvin got hold of Carein.” Her eyes widened and she shot a fast look to the Doctor. “She _did_ marry Carein, right? I’d really hate to accidentally call her wife Carein, when she married someone else, yeah.”

The Doctor lifted his head, his hearts really not willing to allow his brain to properly catch up and on to what Rose was suggesting. His eyes widened when Carein, dressed in the black and white ensemble of the CIA, burst out of the capsule. 

“Why is Carein here?” he asked with lightly rising hope inside his strangled voice.

There was a phone pressed against her ear and she looked around the large lobby with wide eyes that had no clue where she was at all. “Narvin,” she breezed out. “Narvin, I’m here, but how do I find you?” She raked her hand through her fringe to grab at her hair.

Rose readied to holler out to her with instructions about how to reach her wife, but swallowed that thought back when Narvin, dressed in deep purple satin pyjamas topped with a lavender-coloured silken robe burst out of the doorway to the corridor. The cellphone she held in her hand was abandoned with a hard flick of her arm to one side to throw it to one side; and like a Patrexan comet, she streaked across the marble flooring toward the waiting arms of Carein.

Both Rose and the Doctor took a full step backward and gasped at the collision of the two long separated partners. There was no gentle niceties uttered at all, no longing looks of affection, just a hard and clearly bruising collision of bodies followed immediately by an immediate connection of mouths in a kiss so soul searing that both the Doctor and Rose could feel the sizzle of it from where they stood. Carein’s back hit the outer wall of the capsule, and only then did she finally draw herself from Narvin’s fierce and very passionate embrace. Carein panted down into her wife’s face with hooded eyes and a half smile. “You’re late,” she breathed out with a shudder.

“I’m so sorry about that,” Narvin responded with a slightly broken voice. “But I’m here now.” She hooked her arm around Carein’s back and slid the fingers of her other hand between the fingers of her wife. “Better late than never.” With a slow movement, she lifted their arms up over their heads against the capsule and dropped her face to draw her wife into a less urgent, but much more passionate kiss.

Rose bit at her lip and turned away from them; wanting to offer at least a small measure of privacy from prying eyes. She looked toward the Doctor, who’s focus on Narvin and Carein was tight, somewhat shocked, and unmoving. She tugged at his sleeve. “Doctor?”

His eyes didn’t leave the couple against the capsule wall. “Is it just Narvin here?” he asked with a croak. “Or…” He swallowed and finally looked toward Rose. “Are you here as well? And Romana?” His hands snapped out to clutch tightly at her upper arms. “Please say yes, Rose. Please tell me you’re both here as well?”

Rose looked toward the corridor. “We are,” she confirmed. “Both of us.” She looked down at him, his wide and manic eyes, and wondered why he wasn’t immediately moving. Her eyes widened in question. “Well?”

“I can’t move,” he admitted.

“Well you might want to,” Rose said with a smile. “Because I’m waitin’ for you, yeah?” 

“Yeah,” he drawled over a drying mouth. “Yeah.” He released his tight grip on her arms and gave it a slight rub with his hands. His breath drew in deep and hard, quickening with each inhale. He bounced lightly on his toes, up and down, and then beamed a wide smile. A quick lean forward to kiss her on the cheek, and the Doctor turned and ran.

Rose watched with a smile as he disappeared into the corridor. She exhaled softly and turned back to the main doors, holding her hair back with a hand as she wandered out into the warm light of the early morning outside. She moved straight toward the bench and took a seat, leaning backward on straightened arms to let the sunlight kiss at her face.

To her side she heard Leela call out with a cheer. “Good morning!”

Rose rolled her head and looked toward her friend, letting out a chuckle to see her carrying three slayed fowls, two in one hand, one in the other. She looked at the dead birds and then up to Leela. “Is that breakfast?” she asked with a smile.

Leela held them upward, a smile of pride on her face. “Would you like to skin and gut them, Rose, or shall I?”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	64. Oh, Doctor....

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor isn't real good at this reunion thing....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Teeny toy chapter today.
> 
> At around 2pm today, Word white-Screen of Deathed me andI lost everything .. Everything I'd written to that point. There was nothing in the Autosave file, and nothing in temp, so I was absolutely out of luck. Had to redo it all!
> 
> So you know what I did? I went to Big Finish, I downloaded a Short Trip tale, and I pouted and listened to that, didn't I? Yep. I did. Theeeeeen, when sated, I sat down and rewrote everything... And if you can believe it? As I finished up this teeny tiny chapter that should have been much longer, didn't three "recovered" files suddenly show up? GAH... anyway...
> 
> I do hope that you enjoy this... It's just a wee bit to start to tie up loose ends and finish this particular arc out. Oh, and I feel that I should assign some blame here... The ending of this chapter, and the beginning of the next, is all the fault of The_Plot_Thinens, who left me a comment with a wee giggle that I simply couldn't ignore. Yes, this is used with permission.

~~oooOOOooo~~

. 

The Doctor could hear the soft tones of his wife long before he walked through the doorway that led him toward the main offices of the Braxiatel Collection. And while he had been in a determined jog since leaving Rose in the main lobby, he found himself slowing to an almost cautious walk as he drew closer. 

He had every intention of explosively welcoming back his beloved after such a prolonged absence, much of that certainly behind TARDIS walls, but he also wanted to take a quick mental snapshot of the expression she would offer him from across the room when they first saw each other. He coulnd’t possibly capture such a magnificent image of her if he blew in to an immediate soul suffocating snog like Narvin had done.

Narvin, who was male when he left Gallifrey… A shudder ran down the length of his spine. Just what had happened to them to see a regeneration take place? Did Rose still wear the same face she left with? Did Romana?

The questions slowed his approach yet further. He swallowed thickly and closed his eyes at the sound of his wife’s laughter dancing across the space between them; curling around the walls and wrapping him inside an embrace he so sorely desired.

The thin, dim, and surprisingly artless corridor he walked along ended with an aluminium doorframe signalling its close. He could almost have been forgiven for believing that he’d stepped on board a TARDIS for how large the room at the end of that corridor opened up to. It was close to breathtaking the expansiveness of it all. Bright and airy, yet there was not a single window to the outside. It was odd.

But now was not the time to be making any assessment or speculation toward a building carefully built and maintained by his brother. He let his eyes shift toward the gathering of people milling beside a low-walled cubicle ahead of him. Not one of them appeared to notice his arrival, which afforded him a moment to make quick analysis of the scene, to try and determine just how it was that Rose and Romana were able to so easily evade his search for the past decade…

...or more terrifyingly just why if was that they wanted to evade him to begin with. Self doubt swelled in the pit of his belly as he considered that scenario; a scenario likely when he noted that both Rose and Romana were dressed in outfits that were far less prison-ery that he expected. They appeared to be dressed in a manner more typical for archeologists than for a pair of women who had been missing in what he assumed were the clutches of someone or some _ones_ with evil and nefarious intent.

Dressed as archaeologists, and inside the Braxiatel Collection, which was famous for the archeological specialists it had on the payroll.

That stilled him in place and he stared toward nothing with wide eyes.

“Whatever doubt you’re harboring inside that mind of yours,” the younger Romana said softly from his side. “Erase it.”

He flicked his eyes toward her. “What makes you think I’m in doubt?”

“Because you’re not in her arms right now in the rather wet and sobbing state that your brother displayed when he saw his wife,” she answered softly. “Of both of you, I would expect that you would be the emotional one, not Brax.”

“I’m holding it back,” he said in a slightly strangled tone of voice that suggested he was doing just that.

“Gods, why?” Romana questioned.

His voice flattened out. “Why did they leave?”

“They didn’t,” she assured him softly. “At least not intentionally.” She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Okay, it _was_ intentional. But it was a last resort measure of which they had no choice but to execute.” She drew in a deep breath. “It was that or die.”

“Die?” he queried with a fast turn of his head to look at her. “What happened?”

“Ghaestreix attack _,_ ” Romana answered after a swallow. “Their Capsule was damaged, too much to call back to Gallifrey for help.” She looked toward him when his breath drew in hard and a light swear left his lips. “Their only choice was to use the Chameleon Arch, Doctor.” She looked back toward the grouping, who still had yet to register an additional presence inside the room. “For the past ten years, they’ve been working here with Brax and the Collection. Romana,” she looked to her elder self. “Rose.” She flicked her eyes to Rose, currently fussing over the new face of her child. “And Narvin, whose whereabouts are currently unknown…”

“With Carein,” he answered her quickly. A small snort of a laugh made its way through his nose. “Might be best no one goes near the lobby for the next little while.”

She gave a slight laugh. “I’ll make note of that.”

The Doctor’s smile fell. “Does Brax know about the Ghaestreix, and what led to all of this?”

“I’m afraid he does,” she said low. A deeper and more profane swear filtered past the Doctor’s lips, which gave her cause for concern. “Why do you ask?”

“Because he’s going to want to participate,” he growled low.

“Participate in what?”

There was a slow shift in the Doctor’s head, and a slower shift in his shoulders to rise properly to accommodate his drawn in breath. “Never you mind,” he answered darkly.

“Don’t you dare become him,” she warned under her breath her eyes on her future husband. They flicked to the Doctor when he huffed and stepped forward, obviously with the intent to finally make his presence known. She grabbed hard at his tie to hold him in place. “I’m warning you, Doctor. One word to my future, and you … the both of you … will be grounded so quickly it’ll make both of your heads spin. It’s not worth it.”

His eyes flicked angrily toward her. “Ten years,” he reminded her darkly. “They took her from me for _ten_ years.”

She snorted, not quite willing to release his tie just yet. “I’d hardly think it, considering you’re here contemplating the destruction of a species rather than embracing your hearts – as you _should_ be doing.” She narrowed her eyes at his indignant sniff. “I may be very much younger than you, Doctor, from a much younger timeline, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have an immeasurable amount of authority over you.” Her eyes flicked toward Braxiatel. “ _Or_ him.”

“Romana, let me go.”

“Not until I know that you aren’t going to be so stupid as to seek vengeance on the Ghaestreix over this.”

“You have my word,” he sneered through his teeth. When she released his tie with a snap of his hand, he straightened it and started forward. “But you only have mine, not _his_ …”

Her jaw dropped and her eyes narrowed that he would be so deliberately defiant. “Doctor,” she snarled through her teeth to try and call him back. All it did, however, was to alert everyone else in the room that the Doctor had arrived.

The anger he’d held inside his eyes and posture were completely absent now. His shoulders were now loose and relaxed, and his face young and youthful with a smile full of bright teeth. He emitted a sound of absolute and utter joy from the very back of his throat as he jogged forward toward his wife, dipped to clutch at her waist, then straightened up to lift her from the ground and twirl the both of them in a spin filled with squeaks and laughter.

Romana watched from her place against the cubicle wall behind her with worry inside her eyes. The king of loopholes the Doctor was; he’d certainly aid Braxiatel in ways she couldn’t possibly counter if the two of them decided to retaliate over this. That much she knew for sure…

…Thank the Vortex that she’d outlawed the use of the Oubliette several centuries ago. There was no telling if the either of them would consider using it…

“Oh, come on, Dad. Really?”

It was a disgusted moan that had Romana snap her eyes toward the group. Her lips tipped up in a smile to see what had caused the moan of a mortified offspring. The Doctor had his wife in a desperately passionate embrace that had her pinned against a wall, her legs wrapped around his hips. She looked down with a light laugh. “Now _that’s_ how you greet your long-lost wife,” she whispered underneath her breath. She looked to the table beside her, where Rose’s phone sat silent and unattended. With a sigh, she snatched the phone from the table and turned to walk away. Their job was now done, and she supposed it was a good time now to head back to Estrail with Rose and Leela. There was no sense in sticking around here anymore, and much less sense in announcing her departure.

She pulled from the wall and very quietly turned the corner to let herself out of the building. Her threat to the Doctor would go ignored. She put a very stern reminder in her mind to keep an eye on them in her future. Just because she was walking out now, didn’t mean her threat to ground the two of them didn’t stand.

She heard the voice of the youngest of the Braxiatel’s follow behind her as she walked along the corridor. With a sweep of her hair behind her ear and turned only enough to be able to look down along her shoulder at him. “Brax,” she breathed out with a smile, mentally chiding herself for not stopping in the privacy of his office to provide farewell.

“Planning on leaving me without saying goodbye?” he asked with clear hurt in his tone.

She held up the phone. “I was planning to return this to Rose, then I was going to come and speak with you.”

“I don’t quite believe you,” he challenged gently. There was a smile on his face, but the lack of spark in his eye told her quite firmly that her walking away from him like this hurt.

She held her hand to him with invitation for him to take it. “Will you walk with me?”

“It would be my honour,” he said with breathy gratefulness as his hand curled around hers.

There was still tension inside the hold of his shoulders, even with her small hand held within his. Romana moved slightly closer toward him, tenderly curling her hand around his arm and leaning her head on his shoulder. “I spoke out of turn and in frustration,” she said softly as they walked into the lobby, where two Gallifreyan capsules stood silent and yet loudly at the same time. The bright blue of the TARDIS, with her slowly blinking top light, stood out most prominently. But the CIA-issued Capsule, not to be outdone, glowed proudly with its own flashing light that ran up and down along the official seal of the Agency that graced the entirety of the front doors.

If Braxiatel didn’t know any better, he’d have assumed that the two ships were in conversation … of a competitive manner.

He held back on telling either of them to stop. He just shook his head and smiled. “Get two of them together in a room,” he said with a light laugh.

Romana looked toward the capsules and gave a light laugh of her own. “Not unlike more than one Time Lord in a room at any given time, really. Full of one upmanship and chest puffing.”

“Present company included?”

“Of that have no doubt at all,” she answered with a light laugh and a squeeze of her hand on his arm. “I am president, after all.” Her smile faltered. “At least, I was.”

“And you will be once more,” he assured her. “I’m quite sure.”

She exhaled a long sigh. “That is the plan, Braxiatel.” She strode in silence for another step than drew in a breath that matched her exhale in harshness. “I don’t know how you do it, Brax. I really don’t. The long game is simply too exhausting, too frustrating, and far too …” She threw out a growl as she struggled to think of how to expand on that. “It’s far too…”

“Frustrating sums it up well enough,” he said with a light shrug. “And it is. Frustrating, I mean.” He sniffed in deeply, his brows drawing together at a rather unusual odor coming in from outside. “But sometimes the long game is the necessary one in which to…” He frowned as the doors hissed open and they stepped into the light of the rising sun. “What on Gallifrey is that smell?”

Romana drew in a deep breath. Her brows pinched with question, but she was by no means disgusted by the odor that swirled around them. She looked ahead to the centre of the courtyard and to smoke rising from the other side of a small fountain that was in the middls. “Someone’s cooking?” she said curiously. “With fire?”

“Not on the gallery grounds they aren’t,” he growled darkly. He released her hand and pulled himself forward to investigate. The expression on his face was one of pure fury that anyone would be so disrespectful as to set up a firepit and cook on his property. He rounded the fountain, a litany and lecture on his tongue ready to explode out toward the degenerate creature that dared do such a thing.

He skidded to a halt when he saw Rose and Leela seated side by side, propped up against the ledge of the fountain. On one side of Leela there was a pile of feathers in the multi-coloured array that belonged to – by the Gods he hoped not - the critically endangered Xavax fowl. Atop these feathers sat her knives, both of which glistened wetly in the sunlight as though having just been cleaned. A look toward his fountain with pink waters rather than clear confirmed that, yes, they had been.

In front of where the two women were seated was rounded stone set in a circular pattern around a fire that blazed brightly underneath the carcass of a bird that rotated on a stick.

“Just what is going on here?” he boomed out with clear annoyance at the pair of them.

Rose looked upward and offered him a smile. She then gestured toward the bird cooking over the fire. “Breakfast,” she sang out. “A’la Leela. Are you hungry?”

~~oooOOOooo~


	65. Live Exhibition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When there's a Sevateem Warrior cooking on a fire in his courtyard and visitors start to arrive at the Collection, what choice does Brax have but to simply run with it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Had a complete lack of actual focus today. Couldn't motivate myself much at all ... I spent a good couple of hours staring at 7 words on my screen with my chin on my laptop trackpad and my eyes far too close to the screen than should be considered safe.
> 
> But, after some discussion with my muses at discord and the purchase and download of a bloody terrific and very very funny audio from Big Finish called: Time in Office, I laughed myself back into something resembling a fic writer... (I've been on a bit of a Big Finish Kick these past couple of days. Bloody hell their stuff is good.)
> 
> Anyhoo. The beginning of the chapter really is all the fault of The_Plot_Thinens... I blame them completely, but I loved the idea so much I couldn't not use it.
> 
> Heads up: Romana and Brax stuff ahead ...well, not so much ... it's more ... oh, you'll see... See you Monday!

~~oooOOOOooo~~

In more ordinary circumstances, Irving Braxiatel would issue hard orders for the perpetrators of any destruction of his property to collect their gear and clear off before he got very angry with them…

…In more _ordinary_ circumstances. What he was looking at right now could hardly be described as ordinary, and nor could the woman who was the clear ring-leader of this particular operation of vandalism. She was less likely to take any form or direction from him than Thete would on any given day. An addendum to that: She’d be less likely to listen, more likely to flick a knife in his direction for daring to issue said orders.

He slowly closed his eyes, pressed his thumb and index finger against the very inner corner of his eyes and counted slowly from one to ten in Old High Gallifreyan. He then drew in a breath, keeping his thumb and finger either side of the bridge of his nose. He kept his voice deliberately calm. “No, Rose. I am not hungry.”

“Your loss,” she said with a smile after a slurping suck of meat juices from her hand. “It’s really very good.”

“That it is,” Leela agreed with a lift in her shoulders and a proud smile on her face as she chewed her mouthful. “Very good.”

His brows pulled together to offer Braxiatel an almost pained expression. “Please tell me that you aren’t currently feasting on the flesh of a Xavax.”

She bit into the flesh from a drumstick and tore the meat off with a pull of her head to one side. She chewed a couple of times, finally speaking through a mouthful of succulent meat and juices. “Is that what it is?” She swallowed. “Well, it is very good. Very tasty.”

“It’s a critically endangered species,” he said with a huff. “Only 100 of them left in the universe – well, 97 now it seems.”

“It is a shame that they taste so very good,” she remarked around another sink of her teeth into the meat. “If they did not, then perhaps there would be more of them.”

“Leela,” he huffed out in a sound close to a growl. “Really.” He drew in a sharp breath and looked down to Romana with surprise as she moved quickly around him to join the ladies. “Ehm?”

Romana took a seat beside Rose and delicately curled her legs to her side. “Might I try it?” she queried. “It smells delicious.”

“Really, ladies,” Braxiatel said with impatience and a roll in his eyes. “Must you really do this? Must you turn the front courtyard of my Collection into a campground of murder and…”

“Food is not murder,” Leela countered. 

“Many disagree,” Braxiatel argued. His lips pulled down into a frown when she sank her teeth into a large chunk of meat that spit out juices from the cut of her teeth. “It amazes me, Leela, that your stomach is not rampant with parasites and bugs from all of the wild game you choose to consume.”

Her eyes flicked open wide, slightly unsure of just what he meant by that. She shot a quick look toward Romana and Rose, who both shared their meat by pulling directly from the bone without a care it seemed, and then looked back up to him. She petted her stomach with the flat of her hand, careful to keep sticky fingers away from her clothing. “You should show more concern for Rose and Romana. They do not eat the flesh of wild beasts as much as I do. My stomach is strong.” She held up a wingette. “Would you like to try it? It is very good.”

“I’d really much rather not,” he said with a long sigh. “But I would very much appreciate if you would pack away this … outdoor kitchen of yours. I have three school groups from three different solar systems arriving shortly and would prefer that this wasn’t their first impression of the Collection.”

“And is it not a collection hosting many archaeological displays?” Romana queried with a smile.

“It is,” he replied with a lift in his shoulders that showed full pride in it. “The greatest collection of artifacts from all civilisations across all time and space.”

“Then would it not be of a benefit to you for any school groups to witness firsthand the ways of the Sevateem?” She questioned with a slow blink and a widening smile of slight victory toward her defence of one of her oldest and most beloved of friends. “A live and very authentic display from one of the mighty Sevateem.”

His pride fell from his shoulders to slump with mild defeat. “A live and very authentic display, you say? And the addition of two ladies from the Planet of Gallifrey add to this authentication in what way?”

Rose raised her hand and dipped around to look across Romana’s chest toward Braxiatel. “I’m from Earth, same species as Leela… I fit.”

“Not any more you don’t,” he corrected her with frustration finally making its full appearance on both his expression and inside his voice. “You are the mate of a Time Lord, and are a Time Lord…”

“Lady,” she corrected.

“There really is no distinction,” he answered breathily. “Lord is gender neutral in our society.”

Rose hummed out cheekily. “Then what is the gender-specific term for boy-Time Lords?”

“Weaseling Liars,” Leela offered quickly, her eyes on the bird still rotating on the fire. “That is what to call them, Rose.”

“Ouch,” Braxiatel intoned blandly.

The thunder of an eight-wheeled vehicle rumbled up along the road beside the carpark. Rose lifted her eyes to an approaching yellow school bus that looked more like it belonged on 1950’s Earth than it did on a rather technically advanced planetoid such as this. Her head angled to one side and she smiled. “Ancient artifacts including rusted out old school busses from Earth, Brax?”

He wasn’t’ so much focused on her jab, rather he seemed horrified that a group had arrived at least an hour early and there was still a campfire set up in the middle of the courtyard. “Oh, by Rassilon,” he muttered darkly. “Rose and Romana, at the very least can the two of you stand up here with me. If we are going to offer this as a…” he huffed out a breath. “As a live demonstration of life as a Sevateem, it would be more authentic if the two of you weren’t a part of it.”

“They are both very much a part of my life,” Leela reminded him.

“Yes, Leela,” he huffed. “But not on your original planet.” He held his hand down and flicked his fingers urgently as he watched children being offloaded from the bus. “Please, if you will, ladies.”

Rose let out a moan as she leaned forward and pushed herself up to her knees, then pressed her hand onto the ledge of the fountain to push herself to a stand. She held her hand down to offer Romana assistance, which was accepted with a smile of thanks. Both ladies wiped their fingers on the hips of their clothing and took up position either side of Braxiatel, who stood up tall and proud in between them.

“Good morning and welcome to the Braxiatel Collection,” he boomed out with all of the airs and graces he was reknowned for across the Universe. He kept his head held high and his shoulders back as the large grouping of children noisily milled and moved closer. In a messy and disorganised array, it ticked at his sense of perfection. He tried not to focus on it too greatly.

“I am Irving Braxiatel,” he said in a firm voice to settle the children into silence. Only when he got that silence did he continue. “I am the owner and curator of this collection, and I welcome the opportunity to expand your minds and offer you a unique journey into the past.”

“Mr. Braxiatel,” one of the teachers greeted breathily. She was a stout woman with her hair tied back into a tight bun and over-applied garish makeup lining features that would have been pleasant on the eyes had they not been painted to heavily. “We were not expecting to be greeted by the man himself.”

“And what kind of host would I be if I did not,” he answered with the gentlest of flirtation in his voice. A small smile ticked at one side of his mouth to hear Romana’s breath draw in quite hard, and he put on a full smile as he took the woman’s hand in his and dipped forward as though to press a kiss to her knuckles. “You must be Esterina,” he remarked. “It is a pleasure.”

She held her hand to her face and giggled into her fingers. “Oh my. How did you know?” 

“How could I not?” he questioned with a smile. “Such a delight.”

She fanned her face. “Well, you are a smooth one, aren’t you?”

“Slick as an oilfield,” Rose murmured under her breath.

“As a snake,” Romana added with a whisper.

Braxiatel straightened up and gave his hands a loud clap. “Now, unfortunately, I will not be accompanying you on your tour of the collection. One of my archeological professors – a Dr. Everston – will take the lead. But if I may, let me introduce you to Leela, a warrior of the mighty Sevateem tribe…”

As he stepped forward, both Romana and Rose took a step backward. They waited until Braxiatel had led the group to outside of earshot, and both slouched in identical movements.

“Smooth as silk, he is,” Rose murmured. “All charm.”

“Yes,” Romana agreed with clear annoyance. “Can flip his mood within a heartsbeat. Anger to smooth and irresistible charm in a blink of his eyes. Infuriating how well he does that.”

“The woman seemed surprised he knew who she was…”

“Standard parlour trick he employs when trying to ooze charm,” Romana clarified for her. “Easy for a Prydonian such as he. A quick telepathic sweep to determine which charm to use, a touch of her hand to ease into her mind, and he has access to a full range of information.”

Rose tucked her hands into the sleeves of her hoodie. “he … he can?”

“Highly inappropriate behaviour,” she growled. “And is a clear violation of anti-telepathic laws on many planets including our own.” She snorted out a huff through her nose. “Braxiatel, really.”

“Careful,” Rose sang out softly. “You might come across as a little jealous.”

“And if your Doctor did the same?” she questioned with a slide of her eyes toward Rose.

“I’d scratch her eyes out,” she answered with a growl inside a laugh. “Then lay claim on him in the most ostentatious manner with billboard signage stating _Mine_!”

Romana snorted out through her nose with a laugh. “You absolutely would not.”

Rose let her head tilt slightly toward the large banners on the wall of the building. “You know. He’s distracted. We could grab a tin of paint from my capsule and graffiti that thing with big red letters that says he’s a taken man and if anyone wants to question it, you can contact her Lady President of Gallifrey.” She slipped her hands into her trouser pockets and rocked back onto her heels. “Reckon we can add a 1-800- _Brax is Mine_ number of something.”

Romana smiled and shook her head. The twinkle in her eye suggested it was an option worth considering, but the purse of her lips declined due to the impropriety of it. “We won’t.” She drew in a breath. “In his timeline, Braxiatel is very much un-bound.”

“Not really,” Rose said with a deep sigh of swooning. “He’s very much in love with you.”

“I know,” she said with her smile faltering. “As I am with him in this timeline. We just haven’t _connected_ as we should.” She swallowed. “I was in denial to it. Convinced I deserved none of it, least of all the hand of a man as magnificent as him.”

Rose hummed a sing-song sound. “Well I don’t know that I’d call him _magnificent_.” She lifted her brows and watched him with a smile leaning down low to speak with the children. She couldn’t’ deny he certainly had his appeal in that very unique _Braxiatel_ kind of way. “But he’s definitely easy on the eyes, I’ll give you that.”

“And inside the mind,” Romana admitted quite without thinking. “Very much so.”

Rose drew in a deep and hard breath that she held onto a moment before exhaling long. “I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be ne of those taboo conversational topics or not. Inside the mind as a bond … or something more, you know, intimate?”

Romana quickly reddened. She licked at her lip to draw her top one in underneath her teeth. She held it a moment and then released her lip. “Might be best you speak to the Doctor about that kind of thing, Rose. It’s not entirely appropriate for me to discuss with you.”

“Might also be best if you bring it up at a private moment with him,” Romana offered softly. “Broach that topic, show definite and eager curiosity, and I assure you …” She laughed. “you won’t be disappointed.” Her face then lengthened and her eyes widened. “Although, your ability to perform with him in that manner will lead to questions and curiosities that I am not entirely sure you wish to answer right now.”

“How do you mean?”

Romana turned toward her. There was a measure of serious warning inside her eyes. “Full telepathic contact of that nature is only achievable when both parties are from telepathic species.” She looked her up and down, not with judgement, but with caution. “You are not supposed to have that ability. If you show that you do, then he will know who you really are…”

“Which right now,” she admitted. “I’m not sure I even know.” She drew in a breath. “Nor am I sure I even want to remember.”

Romana nodded slowly. “I had meant to ask you that, Rose. Future timelines do suggest that you were largely unaware of your new biology.” She looked back at her husband with a twist of her head that her shoulders slowly followed so that she was facing him instead of Rose. “Brax said that you told the Doctor you didn’t know until you regenerated for the first time.”

“Did he also happen to say when that happened?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t ask, he didn’t offer the information. Quite frankly, the less I know about yours or anyone’s future, the better.”

Rose drew in a long breath. “If I ask you to, will you take it away from me? I mean the knowledge of who I am now?”

“I really don’t want to.”

“But you can, right?”

Romana nodded slowly. “If you ask me to, then yes, Rose. I can. I can make it so that the knowledge of it can be released at a very specific time in your future. Although I am loathe to do so, as it feels horribly dishonest.”

“You’re a Time Lord,” Rose said with a sigh. “Doesn’t that come naturally to you?”

One side of her mouth twisted up in a wry smile. “One of many things, yes.” Her eyes flicked toward Leela, who was eagerly displaying her knives to the children. “Ask her, and she’ll say that a lie is told every single time we open out mouths. Not entirely inaccurate, I suppose. It does feel that we lie more than we tell truths.”

“I don’t believe so,” Rose offered with a supportive smile. She flicked her fingers out to hook around Romana’s hand. With a slow movement, she shifted to hold her hand fully inside hers. “I can see the truth inside you.”

“You see the truth in everyone,” Romana said with a sigh. “Their hearts.” She turned her head to give her a warm smile. “It’s what makes you so special to us. You see what no one else, including ourselves, ever can.” She looked back to Braxiatel. “You even managed to weave your way into his hearts, this him, when he was convinced he had no hearts to give at all.”

“Yeah, well he’s wrong about that,” Rose huffed out. “And you’re all wrong for thinkin’ it. Because Brax, he’s got more heart than any of us. He just needs to know that someone’s willing to accept them. Open to him, he’ll open to you.” She squeezed Romana’s hand. “Love him, and he’ll love you. That’s what he needs. For all his arrogant confidence, he’s just as insecure as the rest of us.” She twirled in place to look around them, gesturing at the opulence and majesty of it. “He surrounds himself in all this beauty and splendour because he doesn’t think he’s got that beauty inside him.”

“I can see why you’re as deeply inside his hearts as you are,” she admitted softly. “Your affection for him is unconditional, isn’t it? Even at his worst you see him at his best.”

“Yeah,” Rose said lightly. “Because I know that no matter what stupid shit he pulls, its always done with the best of intentions for everyone except him. He’ll lie, cheat, manipulate, betray, and continue to make himself look bad, because it makes others look good. There’s always a reason for it, Romana.”

“I know,” she agreed softly. “I have always known, I suppose. I just refused to see it because I refused to believe someone was willing to destroy himself like that just to protect me.”

“That’s called love,” Rose said with a light bump at her shoulder with hers. “He might be a little misguided in how he shows you, but don’t ever doubt it. That man is completely and totally besotted by you. And he will destroy everything he is and everything he could be to protect you.”

“He already has,” she whispered lightly. “He always has.”

“Then you tell him that, yeah?” Rose urged. “That him, the one you’re with now, or the other one. Acknowledge it and let him breathe. He’s wound up so bloody tight sometimes, I’m surprised he can breathe half the time.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Which is why when he gets upset…”

“…he does so on a nuclear level,” Rose agreed. “And yeah, I know I’ve got it coming to me when we get back.” She swallowed as she considered their return to Estrail. “Which we should start planning on doing.”

Romana folded her arms delicately across her chest. Ahead of them, the crowd that had milled around Leela was beginning to move along, following a rather enthusiastic man dressed in the most stereotypical earth-style Archaeology outfit Rose had ever seen. He was exuberant in his booming lecturing of the building they were walking toward and the architectural inspiration for it.

“They are going to eat that man alive,” Rose murmured with a flare in her eyes. “He doesn’t stand a chance.”

Braxiatel chuckled as he walked back toward them. “My staff are very adept in wrangling the otherwise bored and fidgetier members of tour parties.”

“No one is _that_ adept,” Rose said with a laugh. She looked at Romana. “Remember when you and me had to rein in and wrangle two hundred and fifty Gallifreyan children on that trip to the zoo?”

Romana moaned. “By the Gods, yes. Even with almost a hundred adult volunteers and the Doctor leading them all, it was near impossible to keep them all in line.”

“I believe your issue may stem from the fact that you relied upon my brother to lead the group,” Braxiatel offered. The surprise that both Rose and Romana had engaged in such an expedition was clear inside his voice. “Although how you were able to convince him to do that remains a mystery that must be shared so that such methods could be employed the next time I require him to do something I require.”

“I, ehm. I really don’t think you would offer the same deal that I did,” Rose said inside a chuckle.

“Oh?” his eyes widened then creased with disgust when he realised her implication. “Oh! Well. No. Of course not.” Now his mouth shifted to a frown to further consider it. “And is he really swayed by such so much that he would be willing to embark on a Time Tot excursion of that nature?”

“It had been a while,” Romana said with a smile and a shake in her head. “He was, as I recall, somewhat desperate for connection.”

“Which is something I didn’t need to know,” Braxiatel remarked coolly. “Not should _anyone_ ever know. The mere fact that I know that he even engages in such…”

“Be wary, Braxiatel,” Romana warned with a gesture to her womb. “And if you use any negative connotations at all, so help me, I’ll let Rose thump you.”

“Or let me cut him,” Leela said with a tone of voice to suggest that she was slightly hurt not to have been thought of first to exact damage.

“Ahh yes,” Romana said with a nod. “You are first in line, of course.”

“Yeah, and keep those knives handy, Lee,” Rose said with a flick of her brows to indicate her weapons. “Who knows what we’re heading into when we get back to Estrail. Might need my shield of Leela to get me through it.”

“And you know it would be my honour,” Leela replied with a flick of her knife before setting it into her belt. “Are we ready to leave, then?” She looked down to the cooked bird she held in her hand by it’s crooked neck. “I would like to have Andred try this bird. I think he will agree that it is very tasty. Perhaps he and I can return?”

“I think not,” Braxiatel barked out indignantly. “I think just about enough has happened here in these past 24 hours that you need never to return again.” He swept his hands forward to gesture for them to leave. “Now off you go. Quickly.”

Romana held out her hand to him. “Are you not coming?” she asked when his hand curled around hers.

There was a curious pinch in one eye. “You’re inviting me to come with you?”

“Not entirely,” she said with a downward tilt of her ear toward her shoulder. “But you need to locate your capsule. We can help with that.”

“I already know where she is,” he said with clear longing inside his voice. 

“Good then.” She tugged on his hands and led the group toward the capsule. “We’ll take you to her.”

“Yeah,” Rose said with a smirk. “And then you’re on your own.”

“Ladies, thank you.” He said with genuine gratitude. 

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Traveling back to Estrail, with two experienced pilots at the helm and Rose trying quickly to learn about how to fly the young buck, was an entertaining experience. The ship was as playful as it was young, and he seemed to thrill in the dance of three pilots trying to control him. He toyed and teased against their commands, seeming to thrill in the way that Romana and Leela were so easily able to counter off any of the roadblocks he tried to put up for them.

He received chidings and threats from all three women, but it didn’t tamp down his excitement much. It was good to be out and about again, and with three telepathically beautiful women filling his command room, he was a happy happy lad.

When he did materialise back on Estrail, the young Capsule did so with a huff of steam and of hum of happiness. He let the lights on the ceiling lead and follow the ladies toward the doors, then opened them with a wild swing on creaking hinges.

Sunlight and warmth filled the console room. The sound of children playing and singing, and the chatter of Gallifreyans were a blessing to him after spending so much time in damp and silent darkness. He readied to relax himself in a peaceful doze in the warmth and energy given to him by the telepathic minds of thousands of Gallifreyans but got startled awake by a low and booming voice filled with absolute and utter fury.

“Rose Tyler-Lungbarrow, I want to have a word with you.”

He didn’t have time to slam his doors and prevent his new pilot and her friends from leaving the safety of his console room. Looks like dozing may have to wait – his pilot might just return sooner than later. 


	66. Penguins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Gallifreyan Penguin ... A Documentary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's my Birthday today!! Yay me... So this means lots of interruptions and spending a lot of time on the phone and answering emails and FB posts ... not a lot of writing time at all....
> 
> So with that in mind: This comes as a specific request. Back a while ago, Aelwyn mentioned that the Gallifreyan documentary team who had accidentally wandered into Rose's private sanctuary needed to do a documentary on the CIA: The Gallifreyan Penguin. (inside joke)
> 
> I made a promise that I would write it for them as soon as we returned to Estrail. Well. We are back, and i am sticking to that promise. 
> 
> I've halted this right before the fight between siblings ... much of it is written, but it's not ready to post just yet. Got some tweaking to do on it before I'm happy.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this ... mild lighthearted stuff, really. Things from here start to get pretty dark, so enjoy it while we can.

~~oooOOOOooo~

“There are very few species across the entire universe that are as secretive and as dangerous to others as a Gallifreyan Penguin. Highly visible with their black and white colouring…”

“Why are you calling them penguins?” Lord Saron interrupted in question as he looked around his camera at the narrator. He looked beside him to another man holding a taped together boom microphone attached to a broomstick over the head of the young and fairly attractive Lord Ferrim. “Am I missing something? Can’t recall ever hearing the CIA operatives referred to as _penguins_ – never heard of the word.”

Ferrim exhaled a hard sigh. “Is it really always so necessary for you to interrupt me mid-sentence to ask your ridiculous questions?”

“Hardly ridiculous,” Saron said with a shrug. “Don’t reckon I’ll be the only one asking that question, and I don’t think you’ve got an explanation inside that long-winded prose of yours, so you might want to consider that.”

“Which is rather the purpose of a documentary, isn’t it?” Lord Ferrim said with a grunt. “To analyse, explain, detail…”

“Tell me what a penguin is, Ferrim, I dare you.” He pointed at the papers. “Don’t look at that. You tell me, right now, just why you’re calling the CIA unit _penguins_.”

Ferrim lifted his chin. “Rose refers to Narvin and those wearing the uniform of the CIA as penguins, okay?”

“And what’s a penguin?”

“A CIA operative, obviously,” the boom guy answered with a shrug. “You not listening, Saron?”

“Not really. I’m not the one wearing the headset, Autern,” he sniffed back with a gesture toward the headphones cupping the other man’s ears. “So no. The less I have to listen to this idiot, the better.” He settled the large camera on his shoulder. “Makes all this shit up as he goes along, I swear it. Not a bit of truth or actual research at all into any of it.”

“Actually,” Ferrim said with an indignant lift in his chin. He held up a thin stack of papers in his hand. “Researched and composed by his Lord Cardinal Braxiatel.” He slapped the edge of the papers with the backs of his fingers. “And it’s all good stuff. Verified and reviewed by her Lady Rose…” He frowned just slightly. “Although why she found it so amusing, I am not quite sure.”

“Lord Braxiatel?” Saron queried with widened eyes. “He _actually_ offered input for one of these things?”

“Insisted on it. Now please,” he gestured to the camera. “Can we get on with it, please. I assured his Lord Cardinal that we would have this documentary completed before the end of this week.”

“Yeah, right,” Saron murmured as he settled his eyes onto the small display on the rear of the camera. “Go ahead, rolling.”

Ferrim smiled at the camera. “The characteristics of a Gallifreyan penguin don’t vary at all between each member. Male, or female, they all do tend to exhibit very similar mannerisms and behaviours – not to forget identical robing, which makes them very easily identifiable to the onlooker.” He turned his back to the camera and in a very exaggerated manner, made a follow me gesture with his hand. His voice lowered in volume as he paused the forward march of the group with a lift of his hand. “Meet Narvin. The coordinator of the Celestial Intervention agency and lead penguin. In this one particular specimen we see each of the mannerisms and behaviours of a penguin on perfect display.”

Narvin looked across the few metres of distance that lay between he and the small documentary crew with eyes narrowed in annoyed question. His back was held straight, and his chin was upward. There was a light darkening in his blue eyes, no doubt curious and annoyed as to what they were all up to.

“As you can see,” Ferrim said in a voice that was little more than a low whisper. “His white robe and black tabard lends the CIA Coordinator a very visible and very proud posture. Despite his stature being somewhat less impressive than others, a penguin like Coordinator Narvin has developed a rather uncanny behaviour of being able to lift his chin high enough to be able to look down along his nose at any and all persons, regardless of their superior height over his own…”

There was a slight chuckle from Saron at that. “Brilliant,” he breathed out.

“…This lends the Gallifreyan Penguin a level of arrogance that gives him the illusion of being higher than, and hold more superiority than he actually does…”

A female voice sounded up at that juncture. There was annoyance within the flatness of her tone. “Cardinal Braxiatel is responsible for this?”

Saron jumped in such surprise that the camera fell from his hold. With a yelp, a gasp, and the juggle of uncoordinated hands to try to stop the camera from crashing to the ground below him. “By the love of the Goddess. Wear a bell, won’t you, Coordinator?”

“Why would I want to do that?” she questioned with clear annoyance. 

“So you don’t startle me into regeneration for one,” Saron shot back as he finally managed to get control of the camera with an awkward forward lean.

“Oh, this is perfect,” Ferrim gushed with a smile. “Perhaps you would like to participate in our documentary…”

“On the Gallifreyan Penguin?” Narvin droned flatly.

“Yes indeed,” Ferrim answered with a proud smile. 

She held out her hand. “May I ask for the study notes you’re using for this documentary of yours?”

He straightened himself up and gladly handed over the notes. “By all means, Coordinator. You will understand that the notes were put together by his Lord Cardinal, and so any errors should be attributed to him and not my team.”

She took a look down at the papers, and the neatly scrawled loops and circles of the language of the Time Lords typical with Braxiatel’s penmanship. She read the first few circles of text and her eyes narrowed into slits of heated annoyance. “I’m going to take this,” she grumbled with a lift of her eyes to Ferrim, her eyes almost black as they glared toward the narrator.

“It’s the only copy I have,” he answered worriedly. “I’d much rather that you didn’t take them…”

She lifted her head then, her black eyes now filling with colour. “Then I tell you what. You let me take this for now, and I will return with an equally compelling script for a documentary on the Gallifreyan Cardinal.” Her mouth tipped to one side. “And as I am the Coordinator of the CIA, and a specialist in gathering and collating all means of intelligence, you can be guaranteed of a rather exciting documentary for your viewers.”

Ferrim thumbed at his nose. “Well. I don’t know. Most Gallifreyans are very familiar with Cardinals. The Penguins, on the other hand – well, your kind are quite elusive.”

“And also quite capable of hiding bodies where they can’t be found,” she returned flatly.

“Ahhh.”

“There is a reason that my _kind_ are as elusive as they are, Lord Ferrim. Do keep that in mind, will you?” She turned her head as the stalking and clearly furious Irving Braxiatel marched by them. “And speak of the Devil. Braxiatel,” she called out sharply.

“Not now,” he snarled in reply, not slowing his stalk at all. In his hand he held a sleek black device in a white-knuckled grip. For now it was silent, but mere moments ago he had it to his ear and was on the very butt end of Bernice Summerfield’s endless amusement.

She caught up with him with a jog then slowed to a fast stride to keep up with him. “And what has you in such a foul mood?”

“Women,” he growled under his breath.

“And on behalf of all of them I cheer in victory for whatever slight one of them has put upon you.” She sniffed. “Although I doubt very much that your beloved mate would be so happy to hear you speak of 51% of all surviving Gallifreyans with such hostility in your tone.”

Braxiatel stopped sharply without so much of a skid of his boots in the damp grass. He snapped a glare toward the female incarnation of one of his oldest friends. “Might I make a suggestion to you, Narvin? And this is one I very strongly recommend you actually seriously consider…”

“Coming from you, unlikely, but do go ahead.”

“ _Never_ find yourself a mate.” He curled a lip and resumed his brisk stalk. “More trouble than they’re worth at times.”

Narvin kept up with the pace. Her brows lifted high on her forehead. There was awe inside her tone. “ _Romana_ has done this to you? Well my level of respect toward her has just been significant elevated. Just what has our supreme Lady President done to manage to darken your mood so brilliantly.”

“Not Romana,” he corrected. “Rose.”

Narvin made a slightly curious sound. “Rose isn’t your mate,” she drawled cautiously.

“I am aware of that. She’s Thete’s mate,” he snarled. “Now where is that brother of mine, I need to have several words with him about the behaviour of his mate and her need to involve my wife in her madness.”

“Out with the male wolf, if I recall correctly,” she answered. “He inoculated and converted seventy infected Time Lords yesterday and was eager to get started early today to beat that number.”

Braxiatel came to a stop once more. His eyes narrowed and he leaned down to look into Narvin’s face. His voice was low. “Are you telling me that he woke, noticed that his wife was missing, and went out on a hunt anyway?”

“Rose is missing?” Narvin asked with her eyes flaring. She quickly turned her head, cupped her hands around her mouth and called to her younger self across the field. Once she was sure she had his attention and he was on route, she turned back to Braxiatel. “Narvin and I will pull some trusted CIA resources to try and locate her. I am to assume that she is with Romana right now?” she held up her hand. “No need to answer that, your mood is answer enough.”

Narvin was at their side in far quicker time that was expected. There was a dark set of question inside his blue eyes. “What’s going on?”

“Rose and Romana are missing,” she answered him firmly. “We need to pull together who and what we can in order to locate them both. It doesn’t need to be said that if any of the people here find out that the two female figureheads of this entire operation are in harm’s way, then it will be chaos.”

Narvin looked toward Braxiatel. His eyes raked up and down his stiff and furious posture. “How long ago did you notice them gone” he queried. His ability to be both emotionless and convey genuine concern at the same time was remarkable. “And do you have anything for us to go on in terms of being to locate them?”

“I know where they are,” he replied darkly. He held up his phone. “At the Collection…”

Both Narvins went completely silent at that. Their countenances were a mirror of each other: flat, and very expressionless. 

“At the _Collection_ ,” Male Narvin said flatly. “As in _your_ collection?”

“Likely with _you_ as well,” Female Narvin added with equal distain in her voice.

“And are you experiencing this rather intense level of fury because your wife might in someway be taking a page out of the Book of Braxiatel and heading back along your timeline…”

“Shut up,” Braxiatel growled. He pointed a finger and let it swing between the both of them. “Not another word from either of you.”

“Irrational hostility,” Female Narvin muttered out of the side of her mouth toward her younger self.

“If your mate was expecting your child and had engaged in reckless behaviours like mine has done, then you’d be irrational as well.” He lifted his hand to his mouth to growl through his fingers. “Rose is in my hearts, but by Omega, she is a bad influence.”

The brows of both Narvins shot upward into their hairlines. It was the male that chose to respond to that, and he did so with a very awkward expression that may or may not have involved a quick look downward to Braxiatel’s going before heading back up to his face. “Expecting. I see,” he said slowly. “And by that I expect that this is a child that is incubated in a womb rather than a loom, which means…”

“Not something that needs to be thought about, nor mentioned … ever,” female Narvin snapped out with a lift of her hand to her younger self. She leaned her head forward in a light bow and her voice softened with support. “Congratulations, Braxiatel.”

The Doctor’s voice came in with legitimate excitement. “Romana’s pregnant?” he gasped out happily. Covered in dirt and dust and wearing an array of multi-coloured splatters of unmentionable substances, the Doctor smiled like a loon. “Well, congratulations, Brax. That’s terrific news!”

Braxiatel spun to glare at his brother. “Yes, it is, isn’t it? And I’d be very happy to take each and every one of your congratulations with a smile and an offer of cigars and whiskey, however right now I am much more concerned with the safety and the wellbeing of my wife and errant Sister in Law; both of whom seems quite intent on stressing me into a new regeneration.”

The Doctor’s face fell quickly. “What’s this about Rose?”

“And Romana,” Narvin offered up quietly with a look around Braxiatel’s back to ensure that the Doctor seemed equally concerned about his own sister in law as he was his wife.”

“And Romana, of course,” the Doctor said with a quick nod of his head. “What have the two of them gotten themselves into?”

“A lot of trouble,” Braxiatel snarled. “When I get my hands on them.”

A gust of wind quickly swirled up around the encampment, bringing with it the howl and whine of a very young time ship’s juvenile Relative Dimensional Stabiliser. It raked across the grassy landscape with a youthful and eager sound that was similar to laughter howling out of the vortex. Four pairs of Time Lord eyes shifted toward a spot beside Braxiatel’s proud capsule, where a thin grey cylinder pulsed in and out of reality.

“Who is that?” the Doctor asked cautiously. 

“It’s not a capsule I recognise,” Narvin said on a low voice. His hand automatically shifted toward his holster. “I know the registration numbers of all currently registered time ships, and that’s not one of them.”

“You know all of them by rote?” Braxiatel queried.

“There’s so few left,” he answered. “They deserve to be remembered.”

Female Narvin’s face stretched into a smile. “Oh, I know that one. Playful young buck, he is. Doesn’t matter how many years he puts on his odometer, his materialisations always sound like a happy laugh across the Time Vortex.” She held her hand against where her younger self held onto his staser. “They’re safe,” she assured him.

“Who?” he asked her quietly.

She flicked her eyes to Braxiatel. “I do believe your wife has returned.”

His eyes were wide as she capsule finally hissed out his final materialisation with a cloud of steam. “Where did Romana find a capsule?”

“It’s not Romana’s capsule,” she replied with a smile. “He belongs to Rose. This must be when she created their symbiotic link.”

The Doctor gasped out. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I’ll add my incredulity to the Doctor's,” the younger Narvin said with a twist in his expression. “A non Time Lord cannot create a symbiotic link with a capsule. They don’t have the symbiotic nuclei required for connection…”

“Noooo,” Narvin drawled slowly in reply. “They don’t, do they…”

Braxiatel waved a hand at all of them. “We can argue the finer points of symbiotically linking with a travel capsule later. Right now I intend on having a few words with…” The doors to the capsule swung open in an excited manner. Romana stepped out of the ship first, followed in a line by Leela and then Rose. Braxiatel immediately stalked forward, his attention on the last person in the group. “Rose Tyler-Lungbarrow,” he growled out hotly. “I want to have a word with you.”


	67. Brax vs Rose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brax and Rose get into it...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this one disappoints at all ... I had a struggle with it. None of these damn characters would bloody well do anything that I wanted them to do. No matter how hard I pushed, they pushed back with a defiant "NO!"
> 
> Shits...
> 
> Sighhhhh... Therefore, this was the best I could manage.
> 
> Hope you enjoy ... and please remember: Everything has a meaning... even this chapter.... thanks.

~oooOOOoooo~

Rose didn’t even bother looking at Braxiatel as she passed. She just held up her hand into his face as she walked past him. “Yeah, don’t much want to have any words with you, thanks. Heard enough, ta.”

He held back from grasping at her arm or any part of her to stop her from walking by him. He could see the glare of warning from Leela. The dead bird hanging from her hand was more than an adequate warning for him to not to dare trying, or else he’d be the one hanging by his throat. He opted, instead, to try and stop Rose in her tracks simply by use of his voice, low and threatening.

“Don’t you walk away from me,” he snarled with a slow shift of his head to follow her movements. His glare was such that if he’d been loomed with the telekinetic ability given to some of his cousins, she’d be standing directly in front of him right now, held in place and ready for a good talking to. 

For Rose hearing his warning, well, it created a rather petulant temptation to skip like a little girl, just to be a shit, but she felt continuing to walk was snark enough. Her hand held upward was still a clear sign that she did not want to talk to or even hear his voice right now. 

She saw the slightly surprised expression on the face of her husband and gave him a big beaming grin. Her arms opened wide to him. “Doctor,” she half whimpered. Her arms came around his neck and shoulders and she moved quickly to claim his mouth in a lazy, open-mouthed welcome. His arms snapped tightly around her back with immediate response, and within a moment the laziness of the kiss shifted toward a more passionate encounter that had him purring down the back of her throat. He chuckled lightly as he pulled back from her and pressed a kiss to the tip of her nose.

“How was the Collection? Did you have fun?”

Rose pursed her lips before letting her tongue slide across it with light guilt. “Andred ratted us out, didn’t he?”

“He did,” the Doctor answered with a lightly playful smile. “When he came to collect Tiallu.”

“What else did he tell you?”

A brow flicked up high over one eye. He hummed in question. “Are you implying that you got up to something more than a simple exploration of the Collection?” he angled his head to one side and smiled when she quickly and tightly shook her head at him. It was clear he didn’t completely believe that but chose not to dwell on it. Instead he lightly tightened the hold of his arms around her waist and let out a light sigh. “I’ll admit to feeling a bit left out on that, Rose. I missed the chance to lead you on a tour around the Collection and impress you with my knowledge.”

“Oh, but I had the man himself leading the tour,” she said with a smile. “ _And_ Bernice. Doubt you could hold up against the pair of them, really.”

“You might be surprised,” he said with a chuckle. “Though I will say that Bernice is quite the remarkable woman. While my intellect over my brother’s is superior on any given day, I might have competition with Benny when it comes to the Collection and its artifacts.”

Her brows lifted and her eyes widened with excitement. “Oh, Doctor. I have to tell you what piece of art he has at the Collection – and you’re going to love this!”

He was immediately intrigued. “Oh? And what’s that?”

“Are you planning on coming to the end of this rather pointless exercise in avoidance, Rose?” Braxiatel asked flatly after a moment. He pulled up his sleeve and looked at a watch on his wrist to make sure that his annoyance was obvious to anyone watching them. “I really don’t have all day, you know.”

“I do,” Rose sang with a chirp in her tone. She dropped her arms from around her husband’s neck and took his hand in hers. “So where are our beautiful babies? I need a Mark cuddle and a spray of Alirra kisses on my cheeks. It’s been a day.”

“Rose, I am not playing,” Braxiatel warned.

“He really wants to talk to you,” the Doctor suggested quietly.

“He doesn’t want to talk, he wants to yell,” she replied with a sniff and a curl in her lip. “And I’ve about had enough of angry Braxiatel for today, thanks.

“I understand that, but it’s probably for the best you listen to what he has to say and get it over and done with.” He had a slightly wry smile on his face. “And don’t worry about the potential for raised voices. I’m here. I won’t let him get too yelly at you.” The snort from his brother behind Rose’s shoulder warned the Doctor that it might not be as easy as he thought it would be. He shifted his eyes up over Rose’s shoulder to look at him in warning but said nothing.

“I’ve already said what I needed to say,” she declined on a low voice. “I have nothing else to say to him right now.”

“And telling me to go fuck myself was what you wished to express?” Braxiatel snapped in.

The Doctor’s entire face lengthened in horror and surprise. “Rose said what?” his eyes were wide. What in the name of Omega had his brother said to her to warrant _that_ response?

“You heard that right, Thete.” He gestured toward her with an upward then downward sweep of his hand. “Uncouth and lewd.”

Rose lifted her chin indignantly. “That was merely your interpretation of what I said.” 

“ _Go and copulate with an identical genome_ , I believe was your _exact_ wording,” he snapped, not entirely surprised to hear his brother splutter with shock. “What other interpretations are there?”

She looked toward Braxiatel and shrugged. “Fine, then. Yes, that’s what I meant to say. I stand by it. I have nothing further to add.”

“Oh, you might not,” Braxiatel scoffed angrily as she turned slowly to face him. “But I still have plenty I need to say to you, Rose, and to your behaviour of not only stealing off in the middle of the night without a word to any one of us, but of your continued insolence…” he paused to take in the furious look sparking inside eyes that glared at him through her brows. He smirked. “Adorable, Rose, really.” He circled his finger in the air in front of her face. “But that look you’ve got there; that attempt at intimidation by fury; I’m the son of Ulysses, I have a far darker look than you can ever hope to achieve.”

Her arms folded across her chest and her breast heaved with deep and controlled breaths. “Yeah, _son of Ulysses_ you might be, Brax, know this: I’m a _Tyler_. Unlike you, I’m not all bark.”

“And you know full well I have a bite that more than matches my bark.”

Rose’s lip lifted in a smile. “And I have a _Leela_ …” She flicked her eyes to where Leela was watching them with narrowed eyes of warning. “You reckon your bite might add up to hers?”

He drew in a deep and long breath. There was hostile calm in his words. “In case you’ve forgotten, Rose,” he began with disdain inside his voice. “You currently have a gigantic target on your back. The most fearsome and powerful man in the entire universe has put an order out for your apprehension – and for the assassination of both your husband and myself if we dare step in the way.”

“Even if you don’t step in the way,” Narvin growled on a low voice, his breath as dark as his eyes. “The order is to simply kill you both…”

“Yes, Narvin,” Braxiatel said with a grunt. “I don’t need your input, thank you.”

“Don’t be rude,” Rose chided low.

“And don’t you correct me,” Braxiatel growled at her in reply, his voice rising with his anger. “You will listen to me. You hear me? Listen. Not talk. Not snark. Not say a damn word.”

Her eyes flared angrily, but she remained silent as was demanded.

“And because it is quite clear that you’ve forgotten,” he continued hotly. “It was only three days ago that you were ambushed by rogue CIA agents acting on behalf of degenerates not even linked to his Lord President. Filthy animals looking only for a lucrative payday.” He shoved his hand outward in a point toward the Doctor. “And during that ambush, Thete almost lost you. You died, Rose. Three times, in his arms before he could devise a miracle to save your life…”

“If you’d answered your phone…”

“Don’t you dare blame that on me and my inability to answer the phone at the time,” he snarled. “You have a mate, and one very adept at Capsule travel. Call _him_ if you can’t get hold of me.” He inhaled hard. “In fact, you _should_ be calling him over _me_ anyway.”

She turned her head away from him, choosing not to comment on the fact that her phone hadn’t yet been updated with the Doctor’s number. Of course she’d ensure that it would be rectified immediately after this conversation. No, fuck it. Brax cold take back the damn phone and she’ll have the Doctor get her a new one. Surely, he had a few spares laying about somewhere in the TARDIS. She slipped her hand into her pocket to retrieve the phone as she turned to Braxiatel. She flat palmed the device with a hard shove against his chest. “Take the damn phone, Brax,” she growled. “Take the bloody thing and remove my ability to connect to you ever again.” She shoved it harder against his chest when he didn’t immediately move to take it from her. “Go on, take it. Best for both of us if you do. I don’t much want to have to listen to your irrational tirades, anyway. Rude and insensitive bastard you can be at times.”

He still didn’t take the phone, although the sharp angles of it pressing against the buttons of his shirt were extremely uncomfortable. “You call _me_ Rude and insensitive, Rose?” He let up a laugh that held no amusement to it at all. “You’re the one who orchestrated an unescorted jaunt off planet, without notifying any one of us…”

“Andred knew,” she volunteered with a sniff.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You heard me,” she answered. “Andred knew. We didn’t leave ourselves completely out of options if we happened to encounter a wee bit of trouble on our trip.”

“Andred is not good enough,” he boomed. “You are supposed to tell _me_ if you intend on taking any trips off planet. Particularly if you are taking my _wife_ with you.”

“And what about when it’s your _wife_ who’s the one taking _me_ somewhere? Hmmm?”

He seemed to ignore that comment completely. “We are currently in the midst of an emergency evacuation and resettlement of a quarter of a million people – a number which includes your own mother.” He drew in a deep breath. “Not to mention I have found myself in the position of having to have trusted eyes on each and every one of Thete’s past companions to make sure that they don’t become targets themselves. And why is that, Rose? Why?” he pointed his finger into her chest. “Because of you. Because of what you are and the importance that Rassilon seems to feel you have to his plans of universal destruction.”

Rose gasped and took a step backward from him to escape the jut of his pointed finger. The phone that was held between them fell to the grassy floor between them with a slight whumph sound. There was clear hurt in her eyes. “You’re really blamin’ all this on me?”

“Who else?” he drawled angrily. “Tell me, Rose. Who else?”

“How dare you…”

Romana’s voice filtered in with soft warning. “The both of you, please stop.”

Leela humphed beside Romana. “I agree, Romana. This needs to stop before words can not be taken back and someone gets hurt. Hearts broken by words are more painful than hearts pierced by any one of my blades.”

The Doctor stepped forward as well. Nothing about what he was hearing, nor the potential fall out, was good – for any of them. “I’m with Romana,” he warned quietly. “This needs to stop until calmer heads revail, yes?”

“No,” Braxiatel replied on a breath with a lift of his hand toward him to stop right where he was. His eyes were flared with frustration leading toward utter fury. “It’s about time your mate began to fully understand exactly what is happening around her, and how a simple misstep – such as taking off in the middle of the damn night – can put every single person here at risk. I won’t allow that. Do you hear me, Rose. I will not allow you put every one here at risk because you’ve got your husband’s wanderlust.”

“I would never deliberately…”

“You did,” he growled. “You put all of them at risk, and for what?”

Romana curled her hand around Braxiatel’s wrist I a tight grasp of warning for him to back off. “Now is not the time, Brax.”

“Oh, it is very _much_ the time,” he argued hotly.

“It is not,” she reaffirmed, this time her voice dropping closer to order than simple light warning. She stepped to stand with just her shoulder in between Braxiatel and Rose and glared into his eyes. “You need to back away, Brax. And you need to do it now.” Her hand tightened. “This is something for you and I to discuss - preferably without an audience – at a later moment. I won’t tolerate you doing this now, you best believe that.”

His eyes shifted downward to look into his wife’s glare of warning. “Is that a threat?”

“I make no threats,” she said calmly and very quietly. “However, you can be assured that if you continue to poke and prod an already ticking bomb, it’s not going to end very well for you, or quite likely any of us.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?” he asked with a tightness in his eyes.

“I ask you to trust me, Brax,” she urged through her teeth. “Now is _not_ the time for this.”

Rose grunted out with annoyance. “No, Romana. Let him speak. He wants to talk to me, tell me how dangerous my presence here is to all of you, then let him.”

“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” he corrected sharply.

“No, it is _exactly_ what you’re saying,” she growled hotly in reply. “No chance for you to sugar coat it and back off now, Brax. So, go ahead.” She was clearly becoming hostile. “Give me the best that you’ve got. Chide me like a petulant child and remind me just how much better, smarter, and brilliant you are compared to me. How I am nothing but a terrible influence upon you and your beloved wife: who quite clearly has no mind or will of her own where _you’re_ concerned.” She smirked at the pinch of his eyes to that remark. “So go on. Do your absolute best to make me feel two inches tall. I’ll stay quiet and let you say your piece without argument.” She flicked up a finger when he drew in an inhale. “But when you’re done, then you’re going to listen to what I have to say without interrupting me, yeah. You are going to hear me and keep bloody quiet when I speak.”

The Doctor uttered a very displeased sound. “I really think it’s for the best if we end it here for now.”

“I agree,” Romana said on a low voice. “Rose, go and see your children.” She looked to her husband. “Brax, you can come with me.”

Braxiatel was unmoving, despite the hard tug on his sleeve from Romana. His eyes were locked on Rose, and the heaving rise and fall of her shoulders. “I need you to understand something, my dear Sister,” he snarled out. “You are more connected to everyone here, to their safety, than any of us. What you do, where you go, it matters to all of us. So, get it into your _thick_ head…” He poked a finger into her forehead, snarling when his wrist was harshly snatched into Rose’s trembling hand. His eyes widened at the death-like grip she had on him. “What are you doing?” His eyes flicked up to hers, and he gasped at the swirl inside her eyes. Romana’s warning to him was now crystal clear.

“You don’t get to touch me,” she snarled at him with a slow turn of her hand that twisted painfully at his wrist. “Ever!”

“Rose,” he grit out through his teeth as his body tipped to one side to avoid her breaking his wrist. “Just take a minute. Please?”

“No,” she growled. “Not until I’ve said my piece, Brax. Not until I’ve made it perfectly fucking clear what the truth of today was.” He held him firm, offering both Romana and the Doctor a heated glare when they tried to step in and separate them. “This little adventure of ours was not my idea. It was at the request of your wife that we travel off planet.”

“You should have told me,” he said again through his teeth. Damn, her grasp was strong, and he was unable to fight against it. “Let me come with you.”

“Nuh-uh,” she reminded him. “I said shut up, yeah? So, shut up.”

His eyes flashed at her, his glare becoming fearful rather than purely hostile, but he kept silent.

“We knew where we were going. We knew who was there.” She drew in a breath. “You, Brax. We were heading to _you_ – to the one person in this entire universe that we all know would never, ever, in any one of his lives allow Romana to come to harm. Your love transcends all, and no matter what face you wear, Romana is and always will be your ultimate priority.” She leaned down toward his face. “And _you_ of all people should know that.”

“I didn’t know where you were,” he growled in reply, his wince more for the deepening twist of his wrist. He was almost on his knee in his attempt to ease the pain of it. “How was I to know?”

“Romana wasn’t out of your sight from the moment you first saw her,” she snarled. “Blinded by her presence, as you always are.”

“There’s a but in there,” he determined out loud. He saw indecision and even heartbreak inside her eyes. Fury at him wasn’t exactly her driving force right now. “What happened?”

She drew in a breath hard enough that her nose crinkled upward. “Nothing,” she answered back with a huff as she released his wrist with a rough snatch of her hand. “Don’t even worry about it.” She looked over her shoulder at him as she turned away, her full intention to fall against the Doctor’s chest. “Romana was safe, that’s all that matters, and all you need to know.”

“No, it isn’t,” he growled with unintentional sharpness in his voice as he quickly rushed to a stand and followed behind her. “Rose, what happened?”

She spun hard, her eyes now alight with amber. “What happened, Brax? You really want to know?” She levered her hand behind her at full stretch to point toward the far distant galaxy they’d just returned from. “While you were protecting your beloved mate and making sure she came to no harm. I wasn’t so fortunate. I was kidnapped by my own husband, mad and deranged and full of hatred toward me, toward the son we have together, toward you.” She pulled down her collar to show the bruising now visible on her throat. “See that? See it? He tried choking me to death – my own husband.” 

Braxiatel’s eyes shifted down to the bruising, then shot across with both question and fury toward his brother. “How? You?” The only reason he didn’t rush forward to tear the Doctor to shreds at that very moment was because of the honestly horrified expression on his face.

“Then to make it worse,” she continued sharply, releasing her collar and punching her arm down beside her. “He kidnapped our son, our beautiful boy, and tried killing him. I had to look at my precious son, burned almost straight through, dead on the ground, with no way to regenerate. Jason couldn’t save him, _you_ couldn’t save him…”

“Omega, Rose, I’m…” Although her stance was rigid and full of anger and warning for him to back off, his hands came up to tenderly touch at her waist, a half attempt at some form of affectionate support when a hug wasn’t welcomed. “I’m so …”

She held up her hand, which she then curled into a fist to punch at his chest. “Then I watched my husband, the man my hearts beat for, give up every one of his remaining lives to save him. To save my beautiful boy. I watched as the Doctor died a brutal and explosive death right in front of me, in front of all of us. And I promise you, Brax, I’ll be seeing that image for the rest of my life.” Her breath drew in past a quivering bottom lip. “And all this after I find out from Romana that everything I know about myself – _everything_ – is a lie, that…”

“Rose,” Romana interrupted sharply. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” both the Doctor and Braxiatel snapped out at the same time.

“Timelines,” Romana answered shortly. “If she says anything further, they could rupture. I won’t allow that.”

“If it’s important…”

“It’s not,” she snapped. Her eyes shifted between bothers. “Least of all to the two of you … for the time being at any rate.”

Braxiatel lowered his head to look down at the top of Rose’s head, and her fists that were tightening and loosening against his chest in a perfectly timed rhythm to the beats of his hearts. His brain to mouth filter malfunctioned in a rather spectacular manner when he spoke next.

“And this is why I worry about you as much as I do, because every time you step out of my reach…”

She growled out long and low and shoved hard at her hands to push him away from her. “My God, Brax, you are such an insensitive arsehole, you know that?”

He winced. “That probably didn’t come out right.”

“Fucking Time Lords,” she snarled out. “Why don’t you try ending your conversations one sentence earlier… Just one!” She grunted out as she turned and stalked away. She flicked up her arms to brush off both Braxiatel’s and the Doctor’s efforts to reach out to her. “Just leave me alone, all of you.”

The Doctor wasn’t having any of that, he clenched his fists and started to follow. Romana halted him in place with a warning call of his name. When he glared toward her, she shook her head slowly. “Best you leave her for the time being, Doctor.”

“She’s hurting, Romana, so no. I won’t. She’s my wife, and damn this entire universe to extinction, I’m not letting her hurt alone.”

“Stop him, Brax,” Romana warned low. “She’s only hanging on by a thread, thanks in part to you.”

“Romana…”

Her voice was a low hiss. “I said that we would talk about this later, in private.” She looked at him with accusation in her eyes. “Without an audience, but you didn’t listen to my warning. So yes, your fault. Just give her a moment to find calm, alone. She won’t find that with your brother needling her for more information about what happened.” She blinked. “You can see it as well as I can, he doesn’t like having only half the information, he wants it in its entirety, and I’m sorry… Neither of you can have that just yet.”

“What are you keeping from me?”

“Nothing worse than what you keep from me,” she answered softly. “Now intercept your brother before our ticking time bomb goes off. No one here needs to see that – not after what they’ve all been through already.”

He nodded and leaned forward to begin his stride. His eyes blew wide to see Rose stumble over the exposed root of a nearby tree and fall down to a knee in the dirt. Not usually a thing to be concerned about, for sure, but today was not usual … and neither was the frustrated sound that she made, or the smell of Huon that wafted quickly in his direction.

“Oh for the love of Gallifrey,” he growled underneath his breath. His slow stalk shifted to a jog, then a sprint. He shoved his brother off to one side with both hands with little more than a light stagger in his stride. “hold on, Rose,” he called out sharply. “Quick, come here.” He dipped inside his run to take her arm in his. In a fluid movement that barely slowed him at all, he had her lifted up and across his shoulders and was in a full run toward the clearing. At his rear he could hear the footfalls of more than one person on the chase, none of whom he hoped was his wife.

Omega, even if Romana was fool enough to follow, he couldn’t think to hard on it. He needed to get Rose as clear from the encampment as possible. Based on the pained yell against his ear, the heat across his shoulders and the stench of ancient energy in the air, he didn’t have too much time to do it. He finally broke through the line of trees and bushes of a small clearing. With a skid of his feet along the grass, he pulled himself to a stop and dropped Rose hurriedly to her feet.

He had no time at all to try and steady her at all before her eyes lit up gold, her head was thrown backward, and her chest thrust forward. A shockwave of golden energy exploded from within her with a loud _Whoosh_ of thick golden light.

Braxiatel was in the direct line of it, and the shockwave picked him up feet from the ground and shot him backward. He hit the ground with his shoulder, rolling for several metres before finally coming to a complete stop on his back. His eyes were open wide, his jaw slack, his body still. His eyes didn’t blink, he uttered no groan of pain, and he didn’t draw a breath.

Rose staggered in place, her knees drawn together to support an awkward lean forward. She swayed and looked across the short field toward the prone body lying in amongst the long and unkempt grasses. Her heart sank inside her chest and a single syllabled word of denial exploded from between her lips.

She ran as fast as her exhausted legs could take her, falling at the side of the one she called her best friend in the entire universe. His unmoving, wide-eyed appearance was terrifying to her, and quickly she was thrown back to KS-159 and the image of her adult son lain in the very same condition, unable to be saved.

“Brax no, please,” she pleaded as she leaned down to press her ear over his chest. “Don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. I can’t lose you…”

~~oooOOOOoo~~


	68. Rose is the Champion ... again....

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rose won that round against Brax, didn't she?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning to this chapter. It is emotional, it is deep, and it is very much what I would say is quite out of character for Brax...
> 
> ...not like I've had him ever actually BE in character - but do consider that I had never ever even read a story/listened to an Audio with him in it when I started writing this fic. Now, of course, I have pretty much listened to it all, devoured it all, and can say that a character I was once only ever slightly intrigued in for fic purposes, I now worship at an altar.... with candles and offerings and paintings and epitaphs and shit... 
> 
> Everybody Loves Irving? Why yes, yes I do.....
> 
> Anyway, so yes. this is emotion for Brax... Look away if you don't like sappy Braxie...
> 
> And as always, please remember: there are reasons for everything... Not just having fun for having fun sake....

~~oooOOOOoo~~

Rose pressed her ear down onto Braxiatel’s chest in an attempt to listen to the beating of his hearts. Her ear met only with the thick wool-cashmere of his blazer, and with a growl of hurried frustration, she lifted her face enough to give her the room to tear the garment open.

“You are not going to die on me, Brax. You hear me?” She shoved his tie to one side and pressed her ear back down onto his chest. There was still no rise and fall of it to meet her ear, and she truly feared the worst as she nestled her cheek against the left side of his chest. She nuzzled her cheek deeply into the soft rise of his chest and closed her eyes to listen.

“I guess we can definitively say that you won that round,” he croaked out in a voice hoarse and rough. His chest finally rose high as took in a deep inhale to refill his bypass, then swallowed with a wince. “By Omega, that hurt.”

Rose’s head shot up quickly to look into his face. Although contorted with deep lines and creases from his pained wince, she couldn’t say that she’d seen anything more beautiful in her life than his face; the movement in his cheeks and the slowly shifting focus of his eyes onto hers. 

“I thought I killed you,” she whimpered with a shudder.

His arms snapped up quickly to curl around her back. With a light grunt, he tightened their wrap to pull her down against his chest. His lips were against the top of her head. “You just knocked the wind out of me,” he said with a light chuckle. “It’ll take more than that to take this Time Lord down. I promise you.”

The kick of several pairs of feet shuffled indelicately around them. He heard several voices of concern, and questions of his wellbeing asked in multiple voices overlapping each other. The sound of it hurt his ears and he looked upward into four faces with a glare in his eyes.

“All of you, can you please shut up?”

“We’re just confirming that you’re unhurt,” the Doctor muttered with his eyes scanning the curl of his wife over prostrate form of his brother.

“Not going to say I’m unhurt,” Braxiatel muttered with the contortion of his face softening out somewhat to draw in a breath through an open mouth. “There isn’t one part of me that’s not aching right now, but I’m fine.”

“Brax, I’m sorry,” Rose murmured against his chest. 

“I’m fine, Rose. I _will_ be fine. Been through worse than this and walked away from it.” His hand rubbed at her back. “Can you lot give us a few minutes, please?” At only a small shuffle of feet that took the party only a few feet from his shoulders, he grunted. “A few moments _alone_ , please.” He sniffed in deeply. “Some things need to be said that don’t need your flapping ears listening to.”

“Five minutes,” the Doctor said in a low voice. “You’ve got five minutes, and I’m coming back to get my _wife_.” There was clear territorialism in his tone, which seemed odd.

“Ten, and you can have her.”

“Eight, and if I hear one hint of a raised voice, deal’s off.”

“Nine, and I get one swear.”

“Seven, and if I hear so much as a breath of a curse in rose’s direction and you’ll be laid out like this permanently.”

Braxiatel chuckled. “The eternal pacifist threatening bodily harm. I’m almost tempted to call your bluff.” He then nodded. “You have my word, Thete. Now please, leave.”

Narvin sniffed , then let out a snort and watched as the Doctor turned to leave. “You’re really going to accept his _word_ , Doctor?”

“Yes.”

He turned to follow the Doctor down the small hill. “You do realise he’s Irving Braxiatel, correct? When he says you have my word, it does mean quite the opposite of what it means to the rest of the universe…”

“Then prepare a gurney,” the Doctor said with a shrug as his hands slipped into his trouser pockets and his shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Because he’ll need it.”

Even on his back, Braxiatel was able to shake his head with disbelief. He chose not to remark on Narvin nor the Doctor, instead he looked up at the purple sky above them and sighed. “Rose…”

“You’re not going to keep yelling at me, are you?” she queried in a small voice. “Because, I really don’t know that I can keep on with that right now.”

He drew in a deep breath. “Fortunately for you, it does seem that an explosive energy field of pure Huon energy is enough to suppress that urge within me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind for next time.”

“Please don’t,” he pleaded breathily with a light wince as his shoulders agreed with an ache from his blades to his collar bone. “It’s really rather unpleasant for us both.”

“So’s the yelling.” She lifted her head and pressed her chin into his chest. She was granted the pleasure of looking straight up his nose as he stared directly upward. “I’m really sorry that we didn’t let you know,” she breathed out long. “Romana really thought we’d only be gone a short moment in this timeline. And what we were doing …”

“Why did you go?” he asked without looking down. “What was the urgency of it?”

“I can’t tell you,” she answered with a light huff. “Because ... timelines, you know?”

“Said like I’ve never been known to dance all over them,” he said with a sigh. “But I suppose, if Romana does insist, then I shouldn’t push too hard.” He levered his chin downward, looking down along the length of his nose at her still with her chin on his chest. “What part of my timeline did you end up in? I can’t quite recall meeting you or Romana at all at the collection; and based on the version of me who decided to intercept my phone call, it is an earlier incarnation.”

“Before you met me,” Rose answered. “Romana and Leela mentioned something about the Axis, and how you’d been missing a while.”

One of his arms tightened around her back as he sucked in a hard breath. He did have a somewhat hazy recollection of something occurring at his collection a good thirteen years after he and the alternate version of his brother had fallen into a portal on the Axis. While he couldn’t fully recall the incident itself, except that it had been a CIA intervention, he had vivid memories of the aftermath and the damage sustained both inside his offices and on the grounds.

“…You didn’t like me very much,” she said with a hurt sigh.

“I didn’t really like anyone much,” he admitted. “Well, aside from myself, I suppose. Was quite fond of myself in that incarnation, really.”

“You still are.” She exhaled and slowly drew herself up to sit at his side. She pressed one hand into the grass to sit in a lean, and let the other sit on his chest, feeling the steady thumps of his hearts under her fingers. “And a proper pompous, blunt, emotionless git as well.”

“We both know that’s not true,” he said as he and slid his foot along the grass to draw up a knee. He let out a grunt and lifted his chest to bring himself up to a seat. “Pompous and blunt, yes. An arsehole in the highest order, of course.” He leaned back on his hands and looked upward. “But emotionless? Far from it. I was just very good at hiding it.”

“Your son referred to you as being emotionally ill-equipped.”

His eyes slid to her. “My son. I will assume this was the CIA operative who left here shortly after you expressed your thoughts on my phone call to you.”

Rose’s eyes widened, then she winced. “Again, Brax. Sorry…”

“Forgiven, but not forgotten,” he said with a sigh. “However, I’m going to assume that the boys were sent to the Collection in order to apprehend their suspect…”

“An alternate version of the Doctor.”

He nodded slowly. “I was able to draw that conclusion myself.” He drew in a breath. “And so the husband you watched die was this alternate version of him, and not …” his eyes flicked across the distance, where he could see his brother standing in watch beside Romana. “Not Thete.”

She nodded her head. “That’s right.”

“That certainly does offer explanation to some of the more alarming items within your rant.” He looked to her throat, and to the bruising he could see around the collar of her shirt. He winced tightly. “I’m very sorry you had to go through that, Rose. I am. And had you just told me where you were headed…”

“Please, no more arguing, Brax,” she pleaded. “I get it, okay? We screwed up. We should have told you or the Doctor where we were going…” she drew in an inhale. “But frankly, we knew the both of you would stop us from going.”

“Or would have gone in your place, yes.” He looked upward into her eyes. “Thete and I, we’re far more experienced in handling things like this…”

“Things like what?” she huffed out with a roll in her eyes. “You don’t even know what we were doing.”

“Timelines,” he answered with a long sigh. “Anything involving protection of timelines.” He gestured toward the pair of CIA agents standing at the bottom of the hill. “That’s his … and _her_ … specialty. At least you could have asked one of them if not me or Thete.”

“That would have pissed you off even more,” she said with a slow sliding look toward him.

“Yeah,” he agreed with a clearing of his throat. “Quite likely. Can’t deny that.”

She shuffled a little closer to him, dropping her forehead onto his shoulder. “In 600 years from now, Brax, when all this comes clear to you … Please come give me a cuddle and say sorry for yelling at me and getting mad.”

“I’ll give you one now,” he said with a smile as he opened his arm to her and invited her to move in against her side. “Because I think you need one now, not 600 years from now.”

“ _I_ need one?” she questioned. “Or do _you_?”

He pulled her in close and looped both arms around her. “We both do.” He sighed across her hair when she tucked her head into the crook of his neck. “I love you,” he admitted softly. “You know that, right?”

“I’m in your hearts,” she said with a pet at his chest. “I know that. Of course, I do.”

He exhaled. “Its more than that, though. More than just familial residence inside my hearts.” He sat his chin on top of her head. “You’re a part of me, Rose. A big part of me, and I don’t know just how I’d cope if I lost the part of me you’d take if you weren’t in my life anymore.”

“And just what part is that?”

He loosened one arm from around her back to cup at her jaw. A gentle coaxing of his hand and he lifted her head to have her look up at him. He drew his thumb across her cheek. “The part of me I never knew existed until you came into my life; bringing with you everything I’d ever wanted … without realising I even wanted it at all.”

“And what’s that?”

“Family,” he answered. “Where the feeling inside one’s hearts toward someone like me that is _unconditional_. No matter how Good, how bad, or how very ugly I am, knowing that I still reside inside someone’s heart…” He shifted his fingers from her face to touch lightly between her breasts, to touch above her singular heart. “It’s amazing. This one extraordinary heart of yours…” His voice fell to a whisper. “The thought of losing it…” His eyes lifted. “Of losing you – of losing all of this. It terrifies me.”

“You’re not losing me,” she assured him with a smile. “You’re stuck with me, Brax. Stuck with me, with Thete, and with Mark and Alirra for the rest of your lives.”

He lifted his hand to curl around the back of her head. With a hum in the back of his throat he pulled her down to touch his forehead to hers. “Promise me that.”

“I promise,” she said breathily.

“Good,” he whispered. He pressed the lightest of kisses against her brow and lowered his head again. His hand remained around the back of her head and he again let his forehead reside comfortably against hers. “Don’t break that promise, Rose. Because if you do, I don’t know that this universe will survive my grief.”

“Careful,” she said with a smile as she gently removed his hand from her head. She held onto it and sat back a little. “You’re sounding awfully emotional there, Brax. Might ruin your carefully crafted reputation of not ever giving a shit.”

He smirked and tipped his ear to the small group waiting at the bottom of the small hill. “Why do you think I had them wait down there?”

“So, if I bring it up you can vehemently and indignantly deny it,” she said with a laugh. “No witnesses.”

He hummed with a smile. “Oh, you do know me well, don’t you?”

“Well enough,” she answered with a light tilt in her head as she rocked backward to put light distance between them.

“I want you to take the phone back,” he said firmly. 

She lifted her head with a laugh. “Why? So you can not answer it when I need you?” She lowered her head at his rather indignant huff. She stroked at his arm. “But, you we’re right, Brax. Back there. I really should try and rely more heavily on the Doctor than I do you. You have your own family coming now, and need to focus on them.” She looked upward. “It’s just … it’s habit, you know? I’m so used to reaching out to you for help and support.”

“Then keep doing that.” He flashed a look down to the bottom of the hill, and to the unreadable expression on the face of his brother. “I don’t even know that he carries one, to be honest.”

“Then maybe it’s time he started to.” She slowly lifted her head. “It’s time, Brax. Time, I started to put my trust in him again. Let him be my husband in all the ways that matter.” 

“Not just in the bedroom,” he muttered with a light chuckle.

“Oh, you have cheek, don’t you?” 

He motioned a retch. “Gods, I can’t believe I just entertained a thought like that in my mind.” He slumped backward. “You truly are a terrible influence.”

“Spare a thought for me. Romana’s pregnant, and there’s only one way that happened, yeah?” She rocked forward onto her knees to draw herself up to a stand. Once on her feet, she held her hand down to him to offer help to rise up beside her. Now with him at full height, she had to lift her head to look up at him. Her face broke out in a wide grin. “And now all-l-l-l of Gallifrey is gonna know what Braxie gets up to with Romana-a-a.”

“Please. Don’t ever call me _Braxie_ , again.”

She seemed very disappointed. “Of all I said, _that’s_ what offended you? Me calling you Braxie?”

“Very distasteful.”

She shook her head with a chuckle. She then lifted her head just slightly to look up at him. “So? Are we good? Are we friends again?”

He stepped toward her and curled his arms around her back, drawing her in for a tight embrace. His chin was on her head and he sighed as he looked across to the horizon beyond. “Promise me you won’t run off again.”

“I promise.”

He shifted the angle of his head to drop his nose into her hair. “Then, yeah. We’re good.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~

At the base of the hill, where four curious time Lords waited impatiently for the discussion above to reach its close, the Doctor growled lightly under his breath.

“Is that level of affection between them necessary?”

Romana exhaled quietly. “Braxiatel and Rose have always been affectionate,” she said softly. “There is no need to read into it any further than affection between friends.”

He didn’t seem to completely buy into that. His eyes pinched just slightly and his head angled to one side. “I don’t know. As his mate, and an expectant one no less…”

She twisted her head to him. “And how did you know that?”

“Braxiatel might have mentioned it,” Narvin replied.

“Mentioned is putting it lightly,” the younger Narvin corrected. “I believe it was in amidst his rant as to why Rose is such a terrible influence on…” His communicator pinged and he held up a hand to walk off to the side. “Excuse me, will you? This is a call from Gallifrey.”

The Doctor watched Narvin walk away with a side-eyed look. “As I was saying…” he looked back to Romana. “Romana, doesn’t this bother you, at all, how close the two of them are?”

A rather indelicate and perhaps inconsiderate explanation did rise in Romana’s mind; a reminder of just who Braxiatel had pledged himself to become in order to protect his brother’s young family in his absence; but she felt it best to leave it at this juncture. She went with the safer answer. “I trust Braxiatel, and I trust Rose,” she answered with a lift in her chin. “And so therefore no. Not at all. I know for whom Braxiatel’s hearts beat. I also know for whom Rose’s heart beats.”

He pursed his lips outward. “And you don’t feel even a slight measure of …” His cheeks lifted in a light wince. “…Territorialism at all to see him that tender with her?”

Romana’s brows lifted at that. “Well. No. I can’t say I’ve never felt _that_. Territorialism really is a more of a male condition.” She considered it a moment. “And to question Braxiatel’s potential for such an emotion…” She shook her head. “Unlikely. He and I really didn’t prolong our courtship to experience any feelings of territorialism. The moment we had decided to become mates, we mated.”

“Bonded,” Narvin corrected with a pained exhale. “Please don’t confuse the two behaviours. I do not wish to be mentally blinded with the image of _him_ mating.”

“Fine,” Romana conceded. “Bonded. Braxiatel and I engaged in a telepathic bond of marriage. Better?”

“Marginally.”

The Doctor watched the light verbal banter between Romana and Narvin with a strained expression. “I see.” he breathed out more to himself than anyone.

Narvin caught the response and shifted her gaze toward the Doctor, her countenance clearly curious. “Are you experiencing such feelings, Doctor?”

He cleared his throat. “Might be.” His brows pulled together. “Well, I say _might_ , but my concern is backed up with a definite urge to want to stake claim and …. Punch my brother.”

Narvin smirked and gave a light chuckle. “Standard desire when being in Braxiatel’s presence, Doctor…” She then held up a finger to ask a moment and turned to her younger self, dipping her head to listen as he spoke quietly to her. With a nod and a look shared between them both, the male version of the CIA Coordinator took a step backward, touched at his Time Ring, and was gone. She looked back to the Doctor. “You are both bonded in the rites of marriage, Lord Doctor. You have nothing to worry about – least of all from Braxiatel. These feelings of yours are simply an overreaction to …. Well … by an overtired mind.”

“Irrational response, then,” he huffed. “Yeah. Yeah. Probably.”

Romana uttered a slightly strangled sound of realisation. She lifted her head and hollered out her husband’s name with low warning.

“Braxiatel,” she called out. “Your seven minutes of solitude have now expired. Please return Rose to her husband.” She didn’t offer them a chance to look in her direction before calling out more urgently. “And I do mean _now_.”

Both Narvin and the Doctor offered her a particularly surprised glance. She wiped at her nose with the length of her finger and looked away from them. “Perhaps there is some territorialism after all,” she lied softly.

Both Narvin and the Doctor lifted a brow at her. They replied with simultaneous slow drawls of “yeah.”

Braxiatel returned to the small group a step behind Rose. Once in front of The Doctor, he made a rather grandiose show of grasping Rose by her upper arms and placing her in front of him. “Here you go, Thete. One wife, returned. Free of raised voices and profanity, I can assure you.” He gave her a light and urging press forward. “Now go to your TARDIS, kiss, cuddle, mate, or do what ever you wish to get up to.”

“Somehow having your permission to do that kind’ve kills the mood a little,” the Doctor replied with a lift in one brow, a drop in the other.

Romana stepped back from the group with a quiet movement. “Please excuse me one moment.” When she received a look of question form her husband, she merely lifted a hand to assure him she was okay, and for him to leave her a moment. 

With a narrowing of his eyes, he obliged her silent order. “I’ll be right here,” he assured her.

Romana turned and walked toward Phiroi’s capsule. She bit at her lip and winced when she pressed her hand into the metal cylinder doors, hot to the touch from the midday sun. She flicked her hand rapidly at her side as she stepped inside the oddly dim and silent main room of the ship. “Lord Phiroi,” she called out. “Are you here?”

“In a moment,” he called out from his office. “I’ll be right there, Romana.”

Romana could hear movement inside his office; could hear him get up from his chair. She opted to speak while she waited for him. “It’s been brought to my attention, Phiroi, that there was an added complication to the procedure performed by the Doctor on Gallifrey. Something he didn’t quite factor into his plans when he sent her back to us.” She sniffed in hard and lifted her head to the ceiling. “And while the problem is easily rectified, I don’t believe if can be done without revealing what was done and potentially harming the timelines.”

“I’m aware of the added complication,” he said through the door. “Noticed it almost immediately when she returned. Fortunately, at the time we were too busy for it to be an inconvenience.” He stepped out of his office in a lightly dishevelled state. His scrubs were offset to the point they had to be uncomfortable, and his lab coat was wrinkled and creased. There was a look of pain inside his eyes, a primal darkness inside his eyes. “Unfortunately, our hurry to pack up and depart, as well as resettle and re-establish ourselves had passed. The distraction is gone.” He shook his head. “And so, we have a problem.”

“And what is that?” she asked worriedly.

“I’ve fought it. I have, but even I have my limits.” He opened his arms to her; presenting his disheveled state. “So, know this, Romana: I’m not going to be his only rival – far from it at this encampment. But I assure you, I will be the worthiest contender.” He smirked and strode forward with a look of danger etched across his face. In his hand he held up a syringe. He gave a light press on the plunger to expel an air bubble and spray out just a small amount of liquid form it. “And as you are the only one who knows Rose’s condition and can put a stop to this..…”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	69. Stupidity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narvin goes back to Gallifrey...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know you were expecting closure to the Phiroi bit ... sorry .. not today. Had something else to throw in first...
> 
> I hope you enjoy as we start to pull everything together to try and finish up this monster...

~~oooOOOooo~~

Narvin materialised inside his office within the Capitol. He created nary a shift of energy, despite materialising via Time Ring. It would have been quite possible that no one would have noticed his arrival back on Gallifrey…

…Had someone not been waiting for him in his office.

“Been travelling, have you?” Rassilon’s voice purred out low from behind Narvin’s desk. He’d taken position there shortly after arriving at Narvin’s office to find it empty. As far as he had been made aware, the CIA Coordinator was not expected to be off planet; there were _items_ of responsibility that he had been expected have completed…

…By Presidential command.

Narvin straightened up, adjusted his robe and tabard, and turned slowly toward his desk, and to the man seated comfortably at it. He lowered into a light bow. “My Lord President, this is a surprise.”

“Obviously,” Rassilon remarked with a long drawl in his return. He poked at an old photograph on the desk containing an image of Narvin and who Rassilon assumed was his father. He chose not to comment on the picture, instead he kept his eyes on it as he continued to speak. “And where did you travel too, Coordinator? I don’t recall you submitting any particular flight plans…”

“I don’t usually,” Narvin replied on a low voice. “Filed travel plans can be viewed by others, and I am quite sure you’ll agree that there are times that I need to travel … silently… in order to do my job with any real effectiveness.”

“Your President should always be aware of your movements,” Rassilon reminded him, his eyes finally lifting to gaze on the man. “When I don’t, then I am to assume that your movements are not in my best interests.”

Narvin exhaled. “In this case, My Lord, you can be assured it was in the best interests of my _President_.” He drew in a deep breath and held it just a short moment. “I departed Gallifrey via Time Ring to follow up on a tip about a possible location for the resistance,” he said with a lift in his chin. “I am sure you will understand my need for … discretion.”

“And?”

“And what?”

Rassilon exhaled. “And this tip you were following up on, did it yield anything interesting?”

“Every time I travel it yields something of importance,” Narvin said low. He drew in a deep breath and lifted his chin. “Although the interesting learnings of this particular trip weren’t exactly what I would consider appropriate for your future designs for Gallifrey.”

“Is that right?” he asked low.

Narvin cleared his throat. “If there is something that you wish to say, My Lord President, then say it,” he snapped. “It demeans and insults us both for you to wade around the very edges of the point you’re trying to make.” He snorted. “It is behaviour more appropriate for His Lord Cardinal Braxiatel than…”

“Braxiatel is no longer Cardinal,” Rassilon boomed out angrily, his fist striking hard at the table. “And his name is to be scrubbed from any conversations that take place within the Capitol walls, do I make myself understood, Coordinator?”

“Difficult to achieve when there are standing orders for his execution, My Lord.”

Rassilon’s eyes flared with anger.

“How would you prefer one refers to Braxiatel? I will also presume that such orders will extend toward the Doctor as well, given the similarity of your orders.”

“They are traitors of Gallifrey; traitors of this administration,” he snarled. “When word arrives that they have been burned from any and all timelines, then I shall ensure their names are burned with them.”

“Sounds reasonable I suppose,” Narvin replied with a light shrug in his shoulders. “And your Burner? Has she been heard from at all?”

Rassilon’s lips extended outward with disapproval. His voice was a low hum. “Yes. Well. There have been attempts made at communication, however, her transmissions always seemed to have far too much interference for it to be comprehendible.”

“I see,” he drawled softly. “Do you know of her last whereabouts, My Lord? Perhaps I can intercept and provide her with new means of communication.”

Rassilon pushed himself up to a stand, leaning over Narvin’s desk with the pres of both hands onto the wooden surface. “Can you be trusted with a task of that nature, Coordinator?”

Narvin angled his head to one side. His eyes narrowed to slits. “What are you implying?”

“Your allegiance to the former Lady President of Gallifrey…”

“Romanadvoratrelundar,” Narvin cut in. “Despite your thoughts on our former Lady, she did good things for Gallifrey during her time as President…”

Rassilon set his hands on his hips and laughed. “You were one of her leading detractors if legend has it correct.” He blinked and looked to Narvin with brows pinched with amusement. “Until you chose to become _friends_ with her.”

“We were, indeed, friends at one point.” He exhaled a long breath. “However, that isn’t the case now. Not with her death, of course.” His eyes hardened just slightly as he focused on Rassilon’s face to gauge the reaction.

“You believe the Lady Romana to be dead?” Rassilon asked curiously. There was a light pinch in his eyes, and a light smile on his face.

“Romana did not make it out of the war.” He blinked slowly, the lie far too easy to tell. “She was lost before Arcadia fell.”

“My sources do state otherwise,” Rassilon replied coolly. “Romana lives. And with her _mate_ , of whom we shan’t mention, she has been leading the resistance against me.”

“If that was the case, then I’d certainly know about it,” Narvin said on a low voice. 

“Because the two of you are _friends_ ,” Rassilon remarked with a laugh.

“No,” he stated. “Because I was the one who lit the pyre that sent her into the Matrix of the Lords.” He angled his head low to one side. “As I said to you. I _was_ her friend. In the absence of her mate, the responsibility fell to me.”

Rassilon exhaled low. “So, you are telling me that I should not trust any one of my advisors; that their intelligence…”

“Such as it is…”

“That their intelligence on the resistance is inaccurate?”

“Fabricated more likely,” Narvin said with a long sigh. “Stories to gain favour and the intrigue of their Lord President.” He drew in a breath. “Pair their intelligence toward the Lady Romana and the reasons for their requested audience with you later. I think you’ll find a reasonable correlation.”

“And the word coming out of Estrail?”

Narvin hoped beyond all hope that his eyes didn’t betray his typical neutral façade. That word, and the implication that Rassilon might know of Estrail and the current settlement, was immediately terrifying. He kept himself as calm as possible.

“What of it?” he queried cautiously. “It is my understanding that it is a quarantined planet rife with a virus capable of destroying Gallifrey and all her people.” He angled his head to one side and glared an angry look toward his Lord President. “An entire planet filled with the infected members of our society, am I right?”

Rassilon let his lips shift across his face to settle mostly on one side. “And how did you know…?”

“If you do recall, it was I who allowed you to make contact with the Lady Rose.” He blinked slowly. “An enlightening conversation, if I do say. If that information was to be discovered by others…”

“Do I hear threat in your tone?” Rassilon accused with a narrowing of his eyes. 

“None at all,” Narvin replied. He let his shoulders lift and fall to put himself in a far more relaxed stance. “Although it is important to note that the information, a transcript, and even a recording of that particular conversation does exist.”

“Insurance, you believe?”

“One must protect themselves where necessary,” Narvin replied.

Rassilon smiled as he drew in a breath. “Indeed they must,” he agreed. “Particularly when one has no regenerations left a his disposal.” He caught a one-sided smile from Narvin, one that was more an admittance of weakness than actual amusement. “But. It is fortunate, Coordinator, that you are more valuable to me alive than you are back inside the Matrix. There is a situation that I do wish for you to monitor closely for me.”

“And that is?”

“Estrail,” he answered. “While it is indeed a planet rife with disease, I have a feeling that it stands as a rather important piece of the resistance puzzle.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know.”

“That ... that must be painful for you to admit.”

“Marginally,” he admitted. 

“And why is it that you believe Estrail to be a key piece of the Resistance puzzle,” he asked quietly, proud of himself in the way he came across as completely disbelieving to the point of disinterest. “I would expect that if it was the case, I’d certainly know about it.”

“And you question the _intelligence_ of the rest of council, Narvin?” He looked him up and down. “And yet the most important piece of intelligence we’ve received, you are not aware of?”

“Quite possibly because this great new intelligence of yours doesn’t exist?” Narvin snapped. “Do you honestly believe that a group of Time Lords – many of whom were likely around for the original Dogma virus pandemic – would volunteer to put themselves in an environment where they could contract the illness … simply to stand up against you?”

Rassilon merely raised a brow.

“Time Lords are not that self sacrificing, Lord Rassilon,” he said with a hard sniff. “What would be the point? Overtake your office only to succumb to zombieism the next time they regenerate?”

“Perhaps they feel that a cure can be found.”

Narvin laughed hard at that. “Really. This virus is several centuries old. If a cure was to be found, they would have found it centuries ago.” He shook his head. “Our society may have been a highly advanced species before the war began, but we have a long way to go before we can even hope to reach those same heights.” He shook his head. “You’re better off looking at Planet Earth if you are looking for resistance members. The Doctor, his mate is from Earth…”

“As you already know, our forces raided a home on Earth, a city called London.” He blinked and lifted his chin. “Intelligence provided by your office.”

“Intelligence that was sound when it was provided,” he muttered. “It is not on my office, nor the organisation, that you had the forces move so slowly.”

“Still,” he said with a shrug. “We did manage to have one victory during that raid.”

“Oh?” Narvin asked curiously. As far as he knew the entire operation was a bust. Rassilon had been livid at the close of that mission. “And what might that be?”

“The Doctor’s companions, or former companions as it would seem.” He smirked. “Donna Noble, and Martha Jones. Both of them rather lively Humans full of fire – particularly Donna.”

“What about them?” he asked with more voice than breath – but only slightly so.

“They’ve been guests at the Panopticon now for three days…”

“You say _guest_ …” He didn’t wait for an answer. “And Martha’s husband. A Time Lord, I believe.”

Rassilon had a look of distaste on his face. “Yes, the Doctor has a habit of that, doesn’t he? Casting off his little strays by marrying them off to our Sons of Time.”

“Where is he?” Narvin growled. “The Time Lord?”

“An unfortunate accident on Estrail, I believe,” Rassilon said with a sigh. “His capsule got caught up in the planet’s rather magnetic gravitational pull.”

Narvins eyes shifted off to one side in thought. If that were the case, then perhaps?

“That young human, oh did it defeat the fire inside her when she found out,” he said with faux sympathy. “Survived the Time War with only a single regeneration, only to be lost in a basic, well, traffic accident.”

“I somehow don’t expect it was as accidental as you’re suggesting it is.”

“I had no hand in it, if that’s what you’re accusing me of,” he muttered with an indignant huff. “I wasn’t the pilot.” He drew in a breath and removed the indignance from his voice. “However, that it served an easy purpose in managing to procure his widow and bring her back to Gallifrey…”

“On false pretenses.”

“It makes it easier,” Rassilon said with a shrug. “A willing capture.”

“Why?” Narvin rubbed at his brows. “Why would you threaten an acquaintance of the Doctor’s? He is extremely protective of all of them. Are you insane?”

“Quite likely,” he answered with a sigh. “But one must have a certain level of insanity if they are to defend themselves from someone of the likes of the Lord Doctor. Only a madman can truly understand the mind and motivations of a madman. Surely you understand that.”

“Not being insane,” he answered. “No, I don’t.”

“Well.” He gave a wave of his hand. “Marth and Donna won’t be the only ones to be brought to Gallifrey. Thanks to your own rather detailed files on each one of these companions, we are aware of the residence of all of them.”

Narvin drew in a breath. “And why are you telling me this, My Lord? President or not, what you have done is illegal, I can arrest you for it.”

He exhaled a laugh. “I challenge you to try.” He swallowed, lowered his head, then lifted it again. His chin was high and he held his wrists outward as though inviting cuffs. “Go on, then, Coordinator.”

Narvin closed his eyes and drew in a long breath, his mind counting toward ten with rapid fire speed. This, when the Doctor learned of it – and he would - it was going to be disastrous. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you need to find a way to get word out across the universe that I have the Doctor’s companion.”

“Why?”

“So, I can draw him here, of course.” He looked around the room with a smile on his face. “To Gallifrey.” His smile fell, and so did his voice. “So that I can barter a deal that will secure her freedom…”

“If you think for a microspan that he will hand over his wife to you, then you truly are insane.”

“One life for many,” Rassilon said with a smile. “And even if he chooses his wife over the lives of many, can it be said that she will be so willing to let those people die?” One side of his mouth lifted in a smile. “The thing about Humans, Narvin, and how they differ to the Time Lords, is that they truly are self sacrificing creatures. Far too empathetic for their own good.”

Better than being too insane for their own good, his mind supplied quickly. This was going to go completely pear shaped on a scale never before seen in the universe. Time War? Playground scrap by comparison.

“The Doctor – and even Braxiatel – would never allow that to happen,” he muttered. “While having never met this human – Rose – that you seem so fixated by, I have heard of the affections of both brothers toward her.” He blinked slowly. “If one of both of them come to Gallifrey, she will not be with them.” He swallowed. “They’d exhaust all of their regenerations and die before they’d allow her to come to harm. And not before they do in an hour what the Daleks couldn’t do in half a millennia – Destroy Gallifrey and everyone on it.”

Rassilon gave Narvin an even glare. “Are you quite sure about that?”

‘Certain.” He sucked in a breath. “They are both their father, Rassilon. And you weren’t a match even for him… Ulysses.”

He rushed toward Narvin, stopping just short of a full chest to chest collision to glare down at him. “That name has been stricken from all records never to be spoken inside these walls,” Rassilon seethed. “Not across the entire universe.”

“I know.”

“And yet you…”

“Offer you warning,” Narvin growled. “You do this. You insist on capturing the Doctor’s associates, and you invite not only one, but two versions of the one Time Lord you could never control. The one who stood against you and your laws.”

“The abomination,” he seethed. He then sniffed and immediately switched up his countenance to wear a smirk. “I defeated him in the end, didn’t I?”

“And in turn he defeated you,” Narvin reminded him. “Six regenerations exhausted with a single shot of his gun.”

“And yet, I still walk,” he said with a sneer. “Alive, and with almost a full set of regenerations. The same cannot be said for Ulysses, now, can it?” His eyes narrowed. “Interesting that you know that, Narvin. I thought the only person on Gallifrey aware of those events was myself.”

“If it’s in the Matrix, I know about it,” Narvin revealed. “I make it my business to know….” He smirked. “To know more than even my past, current, and future Lord Presidents.” He drew in a breath and spoke quietly. “And we both know that the Matrix knows everything … despite even yourself trying to tamper with it.”

Rassilon actually smiled at that. “You have the potential to be extremely dangerous, Coordinator.”

“I already am,” he said with a roll in his eyes and a lift in his chin. “Now. What are your actual instructions for me, Lord President? I am a busy individual and would much rather get to the point. This conversation really is becoming quite tiring.”

“Did you show such blatant disregard to the authority of the Presidents before me, Narvin?”

He smirked. “Yes. Now do get on with it.”

“I believe you’re clever enough, and have the best resources available to anyone to be able to get word out across the Universe, all time streams, to be able to have someone whisper inside the ear of the Doctor the circumstances here. Tempt him to walk into our trap to cage him, at which point he will have no excuse by to bring out his beloved … weapon…”

Narvin lifted his eyes to look at Rassilon through his brows but said nothing. Insanity was putting Rassilon’s condition mildly…

“Have you seen her?” Rassilon asked with a deep sigh. “She is majestic.”

Yeah, Narvin had seen it. Had seen her. He saw nothing majestic about it. He only felt terror for what she could become – especially under the control of a man like Rassilon.

“I’ll take your word for it,” he breathed out instead. “And you can be assured that I’ll use the appropriate channels to forward along your message.” He looked to the doorway. “Now if that will be all.”

Rassilon nodded. “For now, yes.”

Narvin watched Rassilon walk out of his office and winced as he strode toward his desk and leaned down heavily with his arms locked and tight on his desk. This was more than a trap for Braxiatel and the Doctor, then was a trap for him as well. The Lord President might be bat shit insane, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t tell Narvin about this because he wanted him to do something as benign as send out a message. Narvin’s double life had been discovered. Rassilon _knew_ of his connection with the resistance. It was clear to the Coordinator that it was expected that Narvin would engage an almost immediate rescue attempt and take these unfortunate humans directly back to the main Resistance camp…. Then Rassilon would trace the energy signature of his time ring – or more likely trace the ladies with a tracer – and have the Guards and Armies swarm.

He couldn’t allow that, nor could he allow the Doctor or Braxiatel show up on Rassilon’s door step…

Narvin closed his eyes and let out a long sigh. He had no choice but to try and save these humans. He couldn’t leave them here….

He walked around his desk and looked down with a pained look as he slowly drew open his desk drawer. In a small cubby within sat a pair of golden time rings, inset with black enamel in the unmistakable infinity symbol of Rassilon. 

He could get the three of them out of here. He had no idea where they’d go, but he’d get them free of here. He had to. Gallifrey depended on it….

…And he truly wished he was joking when he said that.

He pulled the time rings from the desk and exhaled as he slammed the drawer shut and walked toward the door of his office. He didn’t bother looking backward at his desk, and the pile of papers looking for his attention… After he did this, none of it would matter anyway. He would be as much a renegade criminal as his friends were…

…And just as homeless.


	70. Attack in the Capsule

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where we catch up with Phiroi and Romana

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a tricky one to write ... I won't say why, but it just was.
> 
> I'm really not all that clever, you know, to try and bluff my way through some of this. HA!
> 
> Anyway. I hope you enjoy, I really do.

~~oooOOOooo~~

This was a situation that Romana had not counted on happening. She knew that Phiroi was sweet on Rose; he’d hardly made a secret of it; but he always put himself at a respectful distance from her. He knew her heart was held by another. Rose shouldn’t have required a telepathic bond to make her devotion toward another quite clear.

What was Phiroi thinking?

She looked toward the syringe in his hand. Well, quite clearly, he was _not_ thinking.

Romana took a step backward, lifting her hands in a gesture of surrender asking for calm and common sense to please prevail in this situation. “Lord Phiroi,” she said calmly. “Please. Think about what you’re doing.”

“I have thought about it,” he sneered through his teeth, a light tic in his left eye. “Thought about it endlessly since the moment I met her; met that most incredible creature with a singular heart as big as the moon over Gallifrey – only much less cold and barren.” He drew in a shuddered breath. The tic pinched at his left eye again and his head angled a struggled movement to one side. He swallowed thickly. “A sun,” he rambled to himself, his glassy eyes shifted off to one side. “She burns like the sun. All fire and power and beauty.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Romana asked warily. Her eyes were wide, her breathing deep, and despite trying to shove down the fear she felt toward the man in front of her, she couldn’t help but feel grave concern toward his safety…

…Because if Braxiatel had even an inkling of what was happening inside this capsule right now…

She had to end this quickly.

“Phiroi,” she said with gentle firmness. “Don’t do this.”

His eye twitched. “But I have to,” he answered on a rush. “This is the only way, can’t you see? This is my chance. My chance to take what is …” He looked away, a squint in his eye, and growled a panted hiss through his teeth. A short moment, and he glared toward her again. “I can’t let you stop this, Romana. This is what has to be, can’t you see that?”

She took another step backward and sent out a light telepathic wave in his direction, hoping to understand even just a little of what might be happening. She was met with a hard wall that fired back a wave of much greater strength. It made her backward stride falter enough that she stumbled lightly.

She panted and looked upward. Phiroi was a gifted telepath, it was what made him such a great doctor. However, he wasn’t Prydonian. His telepathy was limited to touch. His mind was not anywhere near powerful enough to give her a hard shove such as he had.

Something wasn’t right about this.

“Let me help you,” she offered after a short moment.

He snorted. “Nice try. But you are the bonded mate of my intended’s brother, do you honestly expect me to believe that you would let me rip his hearts out of his chest so I can return to Gallifrey with her at my side?”

“You want to return to Gallifrey?” she asked cautiously. Her eyes shifted toward the syringe he held in his hand. 

“That is the ultimate goal, don’t you think?” he questioned with a definite grit in his teeth. “To return everyone here to Gallifrey.”

“Yes,” she answered slowly. “Ultimately, it is. But not before we know it’s safe for everyone to do so.” Her eyes lifted to his face. “Right now, it isn’t safe. Not for you, not for Rose…” She drew in a couple of breaths. “And certainly not for everyone here.”

He sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“What is happening, Phiroi?” There was a flash of colour just outside her peripheral. A swift and silent movement she may have missed if she blinked. As soon as her eyes caught it, it was gone. Romana felt a shudder race down her spine, and she couldn’t hide the light shake in the upward hold of her arms. She lessened the volume of her voice toward a whisper. “Whatever’s wrong, let me help you.”

He let out a laugh, a shuddering sound containing more emotions than a Time Lord should even be capable of. When he looked to her, his green eyes blinked rapidly as though seeking clarity. Very quickly however, they darkened and hardened.

“I don’t need your help,” he breathed out with his head lowering in a dangerous manner. He took a step forward, holding up the syringe in a threatening manner toward her. “Now keep still, this shouldn’t hurt … too much.”

“What is it?” she questioned over a dry tongue. “What are you going to inject me with.”

He took a quick look at the amber fluid inside the syringe, then back to her. “Let’s call it blank slate, shall we?”

She swallowed. “Which means?”

He winced hard, his head tilting awkwardly to the side. He hissed through his teeth, drawing in a long breath. “I can’t…”

“You can’t what?” she asked hurriedly. She dared step forward. “Phiroi, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he growled sharply. He moved hard toward her, his arm held upward ready to plunge the syringe into the side of her neck.

Romana took a stunned look upward to the syringe, and then down to his eyes. She moved so swiftly that she barely had time to register her own movement. She let out a yell and rushed into a spin. Using the force of her spin, she clenched her fist and levered a hard punch against his left shoulder, hoping beyond all hope that the strike would be enough to drop him where he stood.

She let out a pained cry when her wrist struck at a hard plate covering the sensitive nerve cluster that was the Achilles heel of all Time Lords and ladies. She held at her hand and dropped into a forward lean, holding her wrist down in between the part of her legs. She staggered and looked up at him with pain inside her eyes.

“Oh dear,” he said with faux empathy. “Sounds like a fracture of the radius.”

“That’s cheating,” she murmured with a whine in her voice.

“One does what they can,” Phiroi said with a sigh. His eyes narrowed at her. “Now hold still, will you?”

Romana lifted her head when he lunged forward once more. She grit her teeth and thrust up her good arm to clutch her hand around his wrist to prevent him from taking his mark. “Phiroi!” she demanded. “You won’t get away with this. I’m warning you.”

“Of course I will,” he grit through his teeth as he struggled against her hold. Despite being so much tinier than he was, and with only one hand to fight, she was remarkably strong against him. “You won’t remember a thing about this. Now settle down, you’re pregnant.”

“Exactly,” she snarled in reply. “I am, and I will protect Braxiatel’s child with everything I have inside me. Fight you to the death if I have to.”

He bared down on her, a grit in his teeth and his full body weight in a hard lean over her. “Romana, there’s no sense in fighting.”

Romana was near in a crouch at this juncture. Her legs were bent almost completely enough that her backside was on her heels. She looked upward, her arms extended fully to try and stop the needle from puncturing her skin. She was in a losing battle and she knew it. After a deep inhale she called out loudly to the one man she knew wouldn’t hesitate to do everything it took to protect her.

“Braxiatel!”

“Call to him all you want,” he snarled. “This capsule is soundproofed.”

Romana’s eyes were steeled and determined. “To my voice, maybe,” she grit out. “But not to my mind.” 

“You aren’t strong enough for that,” he said with a smirk. “The walls of this capsule are fortified to protect against telepathic assault.”

“Against lesser species, and …” her lip curled. “And lesser Time Lords, maybe.” She drew in a deep breath. “But I’m not a lesser species, nor a lesser Time Lord. I’m Romanadvoratrelundar, and I’m a master of the Prydonian Order.” She grit her teeth and called out to her husband again, this time blasting out a telepathic wave of such desperate and urgent intensity that would probably bring Braxiatel to his knees on the other side of the door. 

His eyes flashed wide. “What?”

“There are no shields strong enough to protect against the telepathic surge of a Prydon,” she growled as the doors of the capsule flew open and Braxiatel’s furious form stood for a moment in a heaving silhouette in the light. He called her name in a voice filled with concern and anger.

“Irving!” she called to him, still holding firm against Phiroi’s attack, but faltering. “Help me!”

Braxiatel stormed across the room with such ease of stride that he may as well have been gliding across the floor. His shoulders were high, his head low, and there was an expression of such fierce determination on his face that it terrified even Romana to see it.

“Get away from her,” he demanded with a growl. He clutched a tight hold of the back of Phiroi’s deep blue tunic and threw him halfway across the room with a single swing of his arm. His eyes fell upon Romana for only a moment to see if she was unhurt and, not seeing the state of her swollen wrist, he spun to stalk his prey once more. “What do you think you’re doing, laying hands on my mate,” he snarled.

“Brax! Don’t you dare kill him,” Romana called out as she drew herself to a stand. More figures appeared in the doorway, and she knew this wasn’t going to remain a silent incident. She winced and held at her wrist.

Braxiatel chose not to respond to the _don’t kill_ order given by his wife. If he did choose to acknowledge it, then he’d be openly and deliberately defying her demand. And because killing this degenerate was definitely his intention right now, it was best he didn’t acknowledge it.

His stalk reached Phiroi as the medic drew himself to a stand. There was an expression of utter hatred on his features. “Braxiatel,” he snarled darkly.

That confused Braxiatel just slightly. He and Phiroi had always been very friendly, they had been for centuries…

…Well, any friendship they may have had was obliterated the moment Phiroi threatened his wife. And so, did every single regeneration he had left at his disposal. And judging by the shift in Phiroi’s shoulders and the expression of loathing across blackened eyes, Phiroi was ready to kill him as well.

Both men faced each other, their shoulders heaving, their eyes dark, and their breaths deep. It took the blink of Braxiatel’s eyes for the to of them to launch at each other. Phiroi struck first, the syringe he’d intended to use on Romana held high above his hear.

Braxiatel’s arm snapped up to clutch at Phiroi’s wrist. He sounded out a hard grunt as he struck his forearm against his opponent’s throat and drove him hard toward the wall. His grunt shifted to a loud yell as Phiroi’s back met hard with the shiny metal wall, and he pinned him there by his throat. His eyes lifted to the hand holding the syringe that was fighting against his hold with a strength Braxiatel didn’t know Phiroi was capable of. Strength that simply didn’t fit the creature who wielded it.

“What is going on with you?” Braxiatel snarled through his teeth as he battled to maintain the upperhand. 

“You all need to die,” he seethed through his teeth, his voice strangled under the press of Braxiatel’s arm. “All of you. By the will of Rassilon…”

“By the will of…?” Braxiatel was perplexed, but he didn’t let that confusion sway him too far from his intended course of action. He grit his teeth and pushed his arm harder against Phiroi’s throat. In short order his bypass might kick in and prevent strangulation, so Braxiatel focused on his carotid artery instead. “The only one who’s going to die today, Phiroi, is you,” he sneered. “No one lays a hand on ,y wife and lives to talk about it.”

“I said don’t kill him!” Romana called out around the shoulder of the Doctor, who had breached the console room and made a fast approach of her to check her for injury. He currently had her wrist in his hand and was scanning it with his sonic. 

Phiroi smirked. “Better listen to her.”

“Listen to whom?” he growled quietly. “All I hear is the last breaths of a dead man.”

“Don’t ignore me, Brax,” Romana growled. She snatched her wrist from the Doctor’s hand. “Go stop him,” she demanded sharply. 

“I don’t know that I want to,” the Doctor admitted.

“Something’s wrong,” she growled. “Something …. This is out of his control, Doctor. I need to know how and the why of it. We can’t if Brax kills him.” She drew in a breath. “And if you don’t stop yout brother, then I will be forced to. She drew in a breath. “Do you want to allow a pregnant woman to step in the middle of that?”

He let out a breath and turned on his heel. “Yes, my Lady,” he said with a disappointed scowl of his own. He strode toward Braxiatel, slamming his hand down hard on Braxiatel’s shoulder. “I believe your wife was talking to you.”

Braxiatel sneered over his shoulder. “Back off…”

The Doctor took note in Phiroi’s eyes, particularly taking a deeply alarmed stock of them once those eyes shifted toward his. His pupils were so dilated that nothing remained of the deep and analytical emerald green that usually gazed back toward one. His breath drew in as a hitch when the ire within the man switched to focus upon him.

“You,” he snarled. “You … don’t deserve her.”

The Doctor could have asked who he was so underserving of, but he had a fair idea he knew exactly who Phiroi was referring to. “That’s not your determination to make,” he said in a low voice.

“Yes, it is,” he said with a smirk. “It is mine, and everyone else’s determination to make as we issue challenge to you.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

He started to laugh. It was a maniacal sound of which neither the Doctor nor Braxiatel had ever heard before; not even past the throat of the Master himself during his more insane moments. It was a frightening and almost inhuman sound that was shrill and dangerous … And a sound that Phiroi would never emit under normal circumstances.

A low curse rumbled past Braxiatel’s lips. “Take his wrist,” he ordered his brother as he just slightly relieved the pressure he had against Phiroi’s throat. “Stop him from stabbing me.”

The Doctor clutched at Phiroi’s wrist, finding that he had to use both his hands and all of his strength to hold it in place. “Where in Omega did he get this strength?” he asked through the grit of his teeth.

“Hypnosis,” Braxiatel sneered. He drew back his arm then launched it forward, driving his knuckles into his nose with the full force of his weight behind it. The crunch of shattering bones splintered throughout the room, drawing winces and groans from everyone inside the room.

The strength against the Doctor’s hold waned almost immediately as Phiroi lost consciousness and collapsed against the wall. Braxiatel shook out his hand and took a step backward. “Let him fall,” he demanded of the Doctor when he noted his brother move quickly to catch him. “No need to let the only pain he feels is a broken nose and a headache when he wakes up.”

He heard Romana rush from where she had watched the melee, and wholly expected that she was running toward him. He even opened his arms to welcome her against his chest. Romana simply pushed him aside to drop to her knees on the floor beside Phiroi. She pried the syringe from his fingers and tossed it across the room with a wince and a shudder, then fussed quickly over him. 

“IS he going to be alright?” she asked quickly, her voice a panted series of hard to catch breaths.

Braxiatel’s brows were high at her behaviour. Part of him was quite hurt that she hadn’t opted for a quick cuddle before attending to the other man. The rest of him, however, well. That side of him understood exactly what his wife was doing. Phiroi had clearly been the victim of telepathic assault, and it was more important to determine the hows and whys of that than it was to have a quick cuddle…

…Sort of…

“What happened?” he asked after a moment. He loomed tall and stood side-on to Phiroi and Romana, and looked down along his shoulder at the both of them.

Romana looked just offside of Phiroi’s bloody nose and cheek. Even given this situation, she wasn’t quite sure of what could and could not be revealed safely. She closed her eyes to look over the timelines and drew in a deep breath. “Phiroi was planning on taking Rose back to Gallifrey,” she answered on a straight voice. “He wanted to take advantage of the severed bond between you and Rose….”

The Doctor dropped to a crouch at her side. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

Her eyes were closed and she swung the seat of her head on her neck to speak to him directly. “I would recommend you reassert your bond with your wife as quickly as possible.”

“We already have a bond.”

Her eyes opened and she shook her head at him. “Look deeply inside your mind, Doctor, and confirm for yourself. The bond between the both of you has been severed.” She drew in a breath. “And it won’t be long until her unboundedness is noticed by those in the encampment who are already quie enamoured by her.”

The Doctor closed his eyes and felt along the lines of contact that permanently connected he and his wife in the most intimate of ways. His breath drew in as a whimpered sound of shock to find it absent, the only tendril of it that remained was his telepathic hand that hung loosely near the barrier of her own mind. His eyes opened with horror. “How? But that’s impossible.”

“Clearly it is not,” Romana growled out. 

Braxiatel shook his head slowly. “It is,” he corrected her. “There are very few ways that a bond can be severed, and none of them result in his bond mate living and breathing in the same room as him.”

Romana looked to the ground, then lifted her head to the ceiling. Her eyes closed and she drew in a deep breath as she fought through the deepest parts of her mind to locate a believable lie to tell them. The answer came as she touched at Phiroi’s temples and felt the stinging shock of an alien entity fighting back against her touch. “We have a very well developed, very well trained, and extremely dangerous telepath in our camp,” she said gravely. “One powerful enough to sever bonds between lovers.”

The Doctor shook his head slowly. “There isn’t anyone who is _that_ powerful in the mind.” He sucked in a breath. “It’s impossible.”

“Rassilon is _that_ powerful,” Braxiatel offered with a sliding look toward his brother.

“ _He’s_ not here,” the Doctor countered. 

“No,” he agreed. “But a descendant is…”

“A descendant who is no longer a threat to any of us,” the Doctor argued. “I saw to that, remember?”

“Gentlemen,” Romana warned them on a light tone. “There is no sense in arguing right now. When Phiroi wakes, we will have to ask him.” She looked to her husband. “I will hope that you knocking him out like you did was able to reverse the hypnotic assault on him…”

“If not,” he said with a growl. “Then Thete and I will make sure it’s reversed completely. I don’t care how powerful they are, they’re not powerful enough to beat the two of us.”

“True,” Romana agreed. “And if necessary, I’ll help as well. A trinity of Prydonian power is unbeatable.” She sighed out hard. “At least, I hope so, anyway.”

~~oooOOOooo~~

A small and dainty Gallifreyan woman, dressed in the flowing robes of the Mountaineer women of Gallfirey, curled around an emergency rear exit to Phiroi’s capsule. There was urgency in her movements as she took a cursory look left and right to ensure that the coast was clear, and then exhaled a breath and steeped fully into the light of an Estralian afternoon. She stretched out her back and exhaled the smallest of moans.

She hadn’t had complete success in completing the tasks she had assigned herself, which she should have expected. Dealing against Irving Braxiatel was a known difficulty across the universe. He was – for all intents and purpose - untouchable. Teflon coated. Nothing stuck. He could walk out of an exploding, collapsing skyscraper with nary a scratch of a spec of dust on his suit…

…A difficult mark to target by himself. Add in Romana and the Doctor - both of whom were just as cunning, if not more, than Braxiatel, and any missions against them became a task of impossibility. She had been arrogant to believe she would be in any way successful against any of them. It was time to admit defeat and return to Gallifrey.

At least she couple provide her great great great Grandfather with intelligence on the Resistance, the location of Braxiatel and the Doctor … and the location of the one he called the Bad Wolf. Together, she and Rassilon could storm the camp and leave no prisoners….

She dropped her eyes to the communicator in her hand, a small device she’d stolen from Phiroi’s office. Ancient technology that would not be intercepted or jammed by any one looking to prevent communications. She would reach Rassilon, and she would regale him with everything.

She smiled.

A almost musical sonic-sound sped across the grass toward her. She barely had a chance to lift her head to investigate before the searing blue-white light found the space between her eyes. There was a hot sensation inside her mind, a whipcrack of pain, and the pressure of regeneration inhibitors filling her mind.

She blinked to wide open eyes as she fell backward onto the grass. A shadow fell across her at that moment, a figure in black and white. 

“You won’t regenerate,” Narvin said smoothly as she lowered her staser and dropped into a crouch at her side. She didn’t look down at the victim of her staser shot, instead she looked across the clearing to the forest beyond the camp. “So don’t bother trying to.” She lifted the weapon to admire it. “Newer technology, you see, much more deadly than the weapons of your time. The regeneration inhibitors on these things are … well … they are remarkably well designed.”

Phennea didn’t blink. She didn’t speak. Her mind was wasting away to nothing, and there was nothing she could to do to stop the accelerated atrophy of her brain.

“Go to the Matrix knowing this: You did damage today, and you did a lot.” She slowly leaned to one side and pulled a small ring-like device from a pocket underneath her tabard. “Not quite as much as you had hoped, no, but damage enough for you to know this: You are now responsible for the start of the uprising against your Great Great Great Asshole, His Lord Rassilon.”

She smirked. “Not quite as impressive as starting the Great Time War – as I did – but impressive enough nonetheless.” She looked back down to her and opened the golden ring. With sniffed as she clipped the bracelet around Phennea’s wrist. “And I say thank you, young Lady of Rassilon. Because I think without this push, and the one coming from my younger self, I don’t think they’d have ever moved forward with this. 

“So. Thank you. Thank you for saving Gallifrey.” She tapped at the bracelet then stood up tall. She lifted a communicator to her lips and inhaled a breath. “Chancellor Braxiatel. She’s on her way.”

“Good, Narvin. I’ll notify the hospital.”

“Morgue,” Narvin corrected flatly. “She’s not walking away from this. The chances of her shifting back along her timeline …” She exhaled. “It’s not a risk I want to take.”

“Understood.” A brief pause. “Thnak you, Narvin. I think you can return to Gallifrey now.”

She shook her head. “No. I still have some things I need to finish with here. I’ll let you know before I return. Just tell me that my Agency is running well in my absence.”

“As well as it can be with my Brother at the helm.”

“Oh heavens help me…”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	71. Narvin: Past and Present

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narvin's up to stuff... as usual...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been feeling out of sorts over these past couple of days, which means I'm not getting much actual writing done... Some may see that as a plus: "Take some time off, we all deserve it..."
> 
> Heh ... nah ... You're all stuck with me for a bit longer...
> 
> Hoping for some actual energy tomorrow ... let's see how we go with that, yeah?
> 
> Anyhoo, hope you enjoy this wee snippet of a chapter. It's all about Narvin today.... Because Narvin is awesome....

~~oooOOOOooo~~

The amount of time that Narvin had spent walking the halls of the Capitol numbered into the centuries. There was barely a time he could remember not pacing these floors in one way or another. Five Presidents had come and gone in that time, their time in office so much more fleeting than his. The wear marks on the marbled floor were most likely more weathered by his own stride than of anyone else. Light footed though he was as he soundlessly made his way, the sheer amount of times he’d walked along these floors left him more of a contributor to the smooth swooping indentation than anyone else.

A constant, he considered himself. No matter who was in power, Narvin always remained. Council members and their employ really did have a relatively short shelf life…

…And now it seemed as though Narvin’s time in the Capitol was coming to an end. A swift closure borne of treason against the sitting President and his members of council. Whether or not he made it out alive was still in question. He hoped that he would, of course. However, should he find demise at the lethal end of a staser it would at lease be an honourable death … At least in _his_ eyes. 

Leela would be proud, and that thought made him smile. When they first met, he had been a stone cold and hard Time Lord. Could hardly call himself a man, let alone consider himself one truly worthy of being Gallifreyan. They were at odds immediately upon meeting. She held him in much the same disdainful regard as he held her…

…Savage, he called her. A vicious savage. Not worthy to walk the halls of the Capitol.

Time had proven otherwise. Despite being human, Leela was more Gallifreyan than he could have ever claimed to be. Her heart was a tender, yet fierce force that could not be fought against. Their strained and unfriendly meetings slowly evolved into an eventual and – he hoped – everlasting friendship. She had shown him how to be a better Time Lord, a better Gallifreyan, and most of all… a better _him_.

If he died today, he’d never have the chance to thank her for that. But he hoped that she’d at least know that he’d walked bravely into what was certainly an inevitable death with her on his mind; because after all she’d been the one to restart the beat of his hearts when they’d stuttered to a stall inside his chest.

He owed Leela so much, and sadly, she’d never know.

“If it wasn’t for you,” he breathed to himself. “I’d have left them to rot and not given a care about it.” He drew in a breath and tightened the hold he had on the two spare time rings that here in a pocket underneath his tabard. “I hope that you’re proud of me, Leela, because right now … _I_ am.”

“Coordinator Narvin.”

He slowed to a stop and drew in a breath as he let his eyes fall closed in a slow blink. Judging by the clamour and clink of armour, it was a Chancellery Guard at his rear. Possibly a tall man as well, judging by the higher than usual level of sound over his shoulder. He slowly turned and, indeed, found himself having to look upward to look into the face of the man. “Captain…?”

“Commander,” he corrected with firm politeness. “Ansel.”

“Ansel,” he repeated with a light undertone of curiosity to his tone. He’d heard that name somewhere before, but for the lives of him he couldn’t place it. “Is there something that I can do for you?” he queried. Years with the CIA – and friendship with Braxiatel – had told him that if he didn’t want to have to suffer through endless questions as to why he was in any particular location, all he had to do was act as though he ran the place and that his presence should be expected. “I’m really quite busy and don’t have the time for conversation right now.”

Ansel blinked slowly. His back was straight and almost to full attention. “This is a restricted area, Sir. No one is to be permitted access.”

“I am the Coordinator of the C-I-A,” he reminded him, taking care to slowly enunciate each letter of the acronym of the agency. “When it comes to the Capitol, there is no area that is restricted to me.”

“I’m afraid that not even you aren’t permitted here, Sir,” he repeated. “Presidential Order. I will have to ask that you leave.” He paused to look toward his partner, an older gentleman who seemed closer to regeneration than he would have been a respectable retirement age. “Carry on with the patrol, I’ll deal with this one.”

As the other man left, Narvin drew in a breath and contemplated his next move. There was no way he wanted to walk away right now; not before he’d had a moment to check on the wellbeing of the Doctor’s former companions … and sent them out of here. He was more than apt to take on a single Chancellery Guard. Unfortunately, however, they had a rather annoying habit of punching alarms when people got a little too feisty. That would bring an entire platoon, and Narvin – while very good – was not capable of taking down an entire platoon. He couldn’t very well help Donna and Martha if he was dead or incarcerated…

He opted to instead try and assert some form of authority and hope that this guard was idiot enough to fall for it.

“I ask for just a couple of moments with the prisoners,” Narvin said on an even tone. He lifted his chin to attempt an authoritative glare toward the young man. “These are, after all, CIA cells. It is my duty to ensure that our guests are being treated well…”

“Despite being locked up against their will and through no actual fault of their own,” the guard answered on a low tone. His eyes danced up and along the length of the corridor; first left, then right. Finally, he looked back to Narvin and dipped his head low enough to at least attempt to bring himself down to Narvin’s height. “I assure you that both women are fine. They each wait in their own way for the Doctor to come to their rescue. Do you have any idea if and when that might be?”

“I’m sorry?” Narvin huffed out with classic incredulity. “Are you suggesting that I am – in some way – knowledgable as to the whereabouts of the _Doctor_?” He sniffed. “Knowledge that would see me hauled up before the President if I don’t disclose such intelligence to him?”

“Well, as a friend of Braxiatel, and of…”

“ _Friend_?” he scoffed indignantly. “With that trecherous and arrogant fool?” He looked him up and down with disdain. “I am not entirely sure of what they teach you at Chancellery guard school…”

“The Academy,” he drawled.

“Indeed. A particular major of study is it? How to say the exact wrong thing to the exact wrong person?” He sniffed. “Might want to look at updating the curriculum and add a: _How not to get shot by being stupid_ element to the course..” He flicked his fingers in a dismissive manner. “So, if you don’t mind. Get out of my way. I’m a very busy man.”

Ansel’s eyes pinched just slightly. Realisation dawned and he winced. “Ahhhhh. You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“You are Commander Ansel of the Chancellery Guard,” he huffed indignantly. “That’s really all I care to know.” He flicked his hands in a _shoo_ motion. “Now if you wouldn’t mind.”

Ansel looked upward and sighed deeply. He then looked down to Narvin, straightening his back to achieve his full height over him. “Do you wish to see the prisoners or not?” he asked flatly.

Narvin blinked with surprise. “I’m sorry?”

Ansel looked back along the corridors once more. “Look. I don’t have a lot of time for this.” He looked to Narvin. “Either you want to see them or you don’t.”

“And you are willing to take me to see them?” he asked warily. “Why are you so willing to go against your Lord President’s orders?”

“Because he’s not _my_ President,” he said with a low growl through his teeth. “Not at all. _Now_ … are you coming, or are you leaving me to try and release them myself?”

Narvin’s brows pinched in time with a narrowing of his eyes. This could be a trap – a pretty elaborate one by Rassilon’s standards – but could he really pass up an opportunity when presented like this?

“Who are you?” he asked with clear suspicion.

“I thought you didn’t care to know,” he remarked. He then waved his hand. “Follow me. Marson and Kane will meet us at the cells.” He smirked to one side. “Well, at least to stand guard as you do what you need to do to get them back to the Doctor.” He sucked in a deep breath and swallowed. “Preferably before he realises that they’ve been taken to begin with… And definitely before my mother finds out.” He turned just slightly, walking in what should have been an awkward side-on manner … curiously it was a seamless stride. “Tell me. Is mother still on Estrail with Father?”

Narvin’s eyes flared with understanding. Now he knew who this young man was, and from just who he was born. “You’re Andred’s boy, aren’t you?”

“And Leela’s,” he added gruffly. “Yes.” He strode forward a good five strides before he turned back to Narvin with a look over his shoulder. His expression was one of frustration. “Well? Are you coming, or not?”

Narvin didn’t exactly job to catch up to him, but he did move forward in a quicker than normal stride. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Good,” Ansel said on a low tone that conveyed annoyance. “Follow me to the cells. We don’t have much time.”

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Back on Estrail, Narvin held her hands underneath her tabard as the body of Phennea dematerialised in a show of blue hazy light on her way to Gallifrey. She let her breath blow out through pursed lips as the scent of the vortex wafted lightly past her nose. Not an entirely unpleasant smell, but not something she wanted anyone else to catch scent of. She lightly waved her hands through the air in an attempt to quickly dissipate it.

“Narvin?”

She froze in place at the sound of Rose’s voice behind her. Her hand was still held out in front of her, and her face tightened into a wince. “Rose,” she breathed out without turning. “How much did you see?”

“Enough,” she answered quietly. “Enough to start to worry.”

“you really shouldn’t,” she said quietly over her shoulder, still without a turn toward her. “You have Braxiatel and the Doctor…”

“And you,” she added in a lightly hopeful tone. “Romana, Leela, and Andred.”

“That’s right,” she answered softly. “We’re all here.”

Rose walked to stand shoulder to shoulder with the CIA Coordinator of her future. Her eyes fell to the patch of grass that Phennea had laid upon only moments ago. She swallowed, then drew in a breath. “So this is where it starts, then? Where all of us bear arms and rise up against the President?”

Narvin nodded slowly. “The time for talking is over…”

“How bad is it going to get?”

Narvin turned toward her, her breath hitching at the worry inside Rose’s voice. “Rose…”

“You don’t need to sugar coat it,” she said with forced firmness in her tone. “When we were on Gallifrey … back when I…” She gestured to her shoulder. “When you guys _fixed_ me.” She drew in a deep breath. “The Doctor and Brax … They made it seem like what’s coming is pretty bad.”

She smiled lightly. “In their eyes, Rose, you getting a papercut is pretty bad. Don’t gauge the severity of this based on their respective overreactions.”

“And don’t you try and pat me on the head and soften it up for me like a child,” she replied on a huff. “I’d much prefer to be prepared for it, you know. Give me worst case and let it be a pleasant surprise when it goes better than that.”

“Humans,” Narvin said with a light breathy laugh. “I really do admire your…

Rose cut her off with a laugh. “Oh, you don’t respect humans at all, Narvin, don’t even start with that.”

“Well,” she said with a shrug. “I made you laugh, right?”

“I’m not really laughing as much as trying to shied a whimper of fear from you,,” she said with a sigh and a shudder in her voice. “Narvin, I’m really worried.”

“And you have every right to be, I suppose,” she admitted. “What’s coming is going to test all of you.”

“But we all come out on top, yeah?” She nodded quickly. “Because we all have futures, you, me, the Doctor, Brax, Romana … all of us.”

“Yeah,” Narvin answered softly. “Yeah, we do…”

“It’s all in flux, though, isn’t it?” Rose said gravely. “Just because it happened one way in your time…”

Narvin turned toward her. Her expression was of her typical neutrality, although the light sheen in her eyes was suggestive that there was deep concern within her. “Time is always in flux, Rose.” She sighed deeply. “Not even Time Lords can keep time perfectly on her tracks when we wander throughout the timelines. The smallest of things can set off a chain reaction of events that the universe has to compensate for.”

“And you returning to _now_ …” She sniffed. “Are you changing things?”

Narvin shook her head. “I _intervene_ ; I don’t make changes.”

“Yes, the ' _I'_ in C-I-A,” she said with a whisper. “Of course.” She swept her hair from her lips to hook behind her ear. “You know, on my planet, the _'I'_ stands for Intelligence…”

“You have a CIA as well?” Her brow flicked then fell into a frown as she spoke the name swirling in her mind. “Celestial Intelligence Agency?”

“Well no,” Rose answered with a smile. “The Central Intelligence Agency. Earth’s very own Spy agency – without all the time travelling and aliens, and stuff.”

Narvin smirked. “Ahhh. _Intelligence_ , you say?” At Rose’s nod, she shook her head. “If you ask Braxiatel, he’d scoff and say that there’s no intelligence at all within Gallifrey’s _Spy Network_ …”

“He’d say there wasn’t any in Council, either.”

“Likely because there isn’t,” she replied with a light laugh. She looked past the capsule. “We should rejoin the rest of them.” She didn’t look toward Rose. “And if I may ask…”

“...Don’t mention to anyone what I just saw you do?”

Narvin nodded slowly. “Its really for the best that they don’t know for the moment. Something bigger than the lot of them is on approach, and I’d really prefer not to have to field questions, rants, and ultimately the nagging from your husband about using a staser to neutralise Phennea in the manner I was forced to.”

“I don’t quite know that you were _forced_ , Narvin.” She swallowed thickly. “You could have simply apprehended her, tied her up or something. You didn’t have to kill her.”

“Yes, I did,” she answered quietly. “My job, my primary role in Time Lord society, is to protect Gallifrey, protect Time’s web, and to protect my President.” She blinked, still opting not to look toward the woman she spoke to. “Phennea was a risk to every one of them. Relentless, tenacious, cunning … No guilt nor conscience to stop her from doing whatever it takes to complete the task given to her by Rassilon - including heading back along her own timeline from the future to do it.”

“And if she did; if sha came back and killed Brax … the Doctor…?”

“…or Romana,” she added softly, “then the timelines would rupture irreparably. I don’t know that the universe _could_ compensate.”

“But surely she’d understand that,” Rose ventured with confusion. “She’s a Time Lord… _was_ a Time Lord …”

“She was a burner on a mission,” Narvin said flatly. “She’s also a Rassilon. I wasn’t going to take that chance.” She looked to the side, looking toward Rose without actually looking at her. “Now, come on. I’m quite sure they’ll notice us missing if we stay here any longer.”

Rose slipped her hands into the pockets of her trousers and walked a slow gait beside Narvin. “So?”

“Yes?”

“Are you going to make sure that old Rassy finds out that you offed his great-however-many-greats-but-not-really-great-at-all-grandaughter?”

“That was a mouthful,” she remarked with a flare in her eyes. Her expression quickly dropped back to complete neutrality. “When he’s drawing his last breath, perhaps. Let him know that with his demise the very essence of his once proud lineage is exhausted.”

“But not before then?”

Narvin shook her head. “It’s a good parting shot, Rose. I won’t deny that.” She swallowed hard and winced at the lump in the back of her throat. “But Rassilon is a truly vengeful Lord. If he knew what I did today…” She closed her eyes. “None of us would survive the fallout.”

“But won’t the Matrix know?”

“No,” she replied quietly, her eyes dead ahead of her. “I’ve made sure that the Matrix is, for now, blind to all of our activities in this current time stream. Protected by a Data Bomb created by the Braxiatel of my time. Uploaded by my younger self to the entire Gallifreyan security networks.”

“Unbeknownst to him, I’m guessing.”

“Indeed,” she said with a light breath. “Plausible deniability if the patch didn’t take and the attempt to intervene in the current timeline was discovered.”

“Ahhh, if he doesn’t know, then he’d pass a lie-detector or something…”

“Or _something_ ,” Narvin agreed with a light chuckle. The chuckle faltered into an expression of disgust when a young man, one of the refugees from the Northern Mountains of Gallifrey, appeared to the front of them. Behind him was another pair of men lightly scuffling near the capsules. “And just what is going on here?”

He held a single bloom in his hand and held it out to Rose with a light bow in his neck. “My Lady,” he cooed gently. ‘If I might be so bold as to offer you this small token of my affections…”

“No you may not!” Narvin growled out with clear disgust as she swatted at the bloom inside the man’s hand. “Her Lady Rose already has a mate. This being something that you and every other marauding male – and female as well for that matter – should be fully aware of.”

“Do you wish to express intent, _yourself_ ,” he said on a low voice.

“Oh, for the love of Omega,” Narvin said with a long suffering huff. She took hold of Rose’s hand and tugged her toward Phiroi’s capsule. “Lord Sigma! Time you decided to claim your mate!”

~~oooOOOOooo~~


	72. Seeking Answers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Revised Chapter**
> 
> I made a lot of edits and added a lot of new stuff to this chapter.... I flt it was lacking in a serious way and had to make some changes to allow me some room to move on.
> 
> I hope it is better than what it was...

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Braxiatel had refused to do it; refused to pick Phiroi up off the ground to place him on a gurney. His nose lifted high and his mouth curled downward with contempt when asked by his wife to help carry the unconscious man to a bed. He said nothing with his refusal but made his stance on helping the unconscious Time Lord perfectly clear with an indignant sniff and grunt.

That had left the Doctor with the task of trying to wrangle the dead-weight body of a man almost double his girth onto a gurney. He did so without too much complaint. He understood his brother’s mindset completely: this man had threatened his wife. He was lucky all he got out of it was a broken nose.

“What happened?” Braxiatel finally asked with incredible distaste and darkness in his voice. He didn’t look toward his wife, even though the question was very clearly directed toward her.

“I don’t know,” Romana admitted quietly.

“Think,” Braxiatel muttered with a low condescending tone to his voice. “Something had to bring you to this point.”

She glared toward him, her displeasure in his tone unmistakable. “I am not a first-year cadet for you to talk down to, Brax.”

He fired her a look, but before he could respond, the Doctor quickly piped up. There was a glare of warning inside his eyes toward his brother that held until he softened his expression and looked toward Romana. “Phiroi threatened you, Romana. Something had to have led to that.” He looked down to the man on the bed. “From what I know of him … Phiroi would end his own life before he’d think of harming you.”

Braxiatel snorted. “Clearly not.”

The Doctor shot him another glare. His voice was low in warning. “Brax. If you’re going to stand there, scowl and be a general pigrat appendage, then you can leave.”

“A pigrat’s _what_?”

“You heard me,” he snarled. He gestured toward Phiroi. “It was very clear that this episode was out of his control. Getting into a snit isn’t going to help him, help me, or help any of us get to the bottom of this.” He sniffed and gestured to the door. “So, either suck it up or leave. Narvin and Rose are still outside, make sure the two of them aren’t getting into trouble.”

Braxiatel’s face creased with incredulity. “And just what kind of trouble….” He choked the rest of that question when he considered the players involved and drew in a breath. “… _Right_.”

The Doctor felt the closure to that conversation was clear and looked to Romana with concern in his eyes. “And, how are you? Your wrist…?” he jerked and his eyes flared wide at the loud hush sound she made. His eyes hardened at the way she seemed to want to hide the damage from her husband. He looked her dead in the eye and spoke in a flat tone of voice. “Brax. How about you tend to your wife?”

“Doctor…”

Braxiatel shot a look toward Romana. His eyes fell to the cautious way she was holding her wrist. “Are you hurt?” he questioned her along a hurried breath of concern. Although Romana lightly shook her head to say she was fine, he quickly moved toward her with both hands held outward in a cradle in front of him. “Let me see.”

She glared a warning look toward the Doctor, then sighed as she softened her look and gazed toward her husband. “I’m fine, Brax. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.” 

The Doctor watched Braxiatel’s movements over the rims of his glasses. He focused on his stride and the concern in his entire frame toward his mate. “It’s broken,” he advised gently with a flick of his eyes toward Romana’s wrist. “Isn’t it, Romana?”

“It’s broken, yes,” she answered with a slow close of her eyes. “But I am otherwise fine.”

Braxiatel looked down at Romana’s wrist, then lifted his chin to look into her eyes as she slowly opened them again. There was disappointment and even a measure of hurt in his tone. “And you thought you’d try to hide this from me?”

“I don’t need you any more furious than you already are,” she replied with a flat tone in her voice that conveyed warning for him not to press to hard on this subject. “This is a time to find answers, not lose that opportunity because you want to seek some kind of vengeance…”

“Romana,” he pleaded with the hurt in his voice becoming more clearly expressed. “I just want to keep you safe. My single priority is – an always has been – to -”

“Sometimes your actions have the opposite effect,” she interrupted with a huff. To acquiesce his need to protect her, she gingerly lifted her wrist and placed it across the cradle of his hands. “But if it will make you feel better…”

“It doesn’t,” he breathed out quietly. “Of course, it doesn’t. Knowing you’re hurt.”

“I’m fine.”

“Your arm is broken,” he corrected her with a growl. His eyes shifted toward Phiroi on the gurney. “And it’s because of him.”

“Because of _me_ ,” she corrected him sharply. “I hit _him_ , not the other way around.” She waited for his eyes to flick toward her. Her expression and her voice softened. “Brax. I know you think that your primary role as my husband is to protect me, and to defend me against everything you think is a threat.” She held up her uninjured hand to him when he looked ready to say something. “Listen to me. Don’t speak. Say nothing until I’m finished.” She lifted her chin and rolled her shoulders backward to draw up to her full height. “I need you to start to stand down, because I don’t need you to protect and defend me. I think I’ve proven that I can do that well enough on my own.” She shifted her eyes to his. “I need you to be at my side, Brax, not in front of me. You are my husband, not my shield.”

He held her injured wrist in one of his large hands and lifted the other hand to curl around her shoulders to pull her loosely against his chest. He lowered his forehead to press it against the top of hers and sighed a breath that gusted lightly down along the bridge of her nose. “I can’t help it, Romana. You are the beat of my hearts,” he vowed fiercely, his words ghosting down over her nose and cheeks like his breath had. “The thought of losing you terrifies me.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she assured him with a slide of her arm across his back. “We’ve had only a few centuries together, Brax. I promise you we have so many more left to come.”

“Promise me that.” He drew in a breath and closed his eyes, concentrating on the small and dainty wrist he held in his hand. His breath calmed and deepened as he activated a surge of his own regeneration energy to centre on her break. Their hands glowed in between them as the Lindos stitched together the fracture with little more than a tingle.

After a moment, he released her wrist. He kept her chest up against his with a tight hold across her shoulders, and lifted his hand to cup at her cheek, pulling his head back enough so that he could touch his forehead to hers. “My hearts beat for you,” he vowed thickly, a slight waver in his voice. “For all eternity. Don’t ever forget that.”

She circled her other arm across his back to join her hands together at his spine. Her eyes closed as she felt the warmth of their connection fill her mind. “I won’t.” She rolled up onto her toes and lifted her shin to snatch his lips with hers. She invited a tender touch of promise, which he fell into with a light moan.

“Now that we have that settled,” the Doctor drawled with only mild facetiousness. “And that you’ve affirmed and reasserted your roles and responsibilities as mates, would you mind focusing on the more important matter we have at hand right now?”

“Yes,” Braxiatel. “Our once was devoted and loyal resistance physician…”

“I suspect that he still is,” the Doctor said with a convinced grunt. “Don’t doubt his dedication and his loyalty because of this.”

Romana pulled back from Braxiatel’s hold and rubbed lightly at her wrist as she walked toward the gurney. “I agree, Doctor. Something, or I might say some _one_ must have hypnotised him…”

“That much was obvious,” Braxiatel agreed. “Hypnosis, low level intrusion. Pretty basic stuff, really. First year academy cadet level.”

“I’d argue on that,” Romana said with a huff. “There didn’t seem to be anything low-level about what he was fighting against.”

“That fact that he was able to fight it at all,” the Doctor suggested. “Means that the actual hypnosis put upon him was half-arsed at best.”

“Which is likely because I interrupted,” Romana said softly. “When I came in, he was otherwise occupied in his office and took his time to come out and greet me properly.” She looked down to the unconscious Time Lord. “Which is odd. No matter what he’s engaged in, he always greets any visitor immediately.”

Both the Doctor and Braxiatel looked toward Phiroi’s office. “Do you think whoever did this is still in the capsule?”

“Unlikely,” Romana answered. “During the encounter, I did see someone try and make escape.”

“Did you see who?” Braxiatel queried.

She shook her head. “Female, that’s all I could make out. I was otherwise occupied at the time.”

“I think we already know just who it was,” Braxiatel offered with a low huff and a lowered head. His eyes shifted up to his brother to glare toward him through his brows. “The ex-girlfriend you decided to bring home.”

The Doctor shook his head slowly. “No. It can’t be her,” he disagreed flatly. “What I did inside her mind that night…” his drew in a deep breath as his entire face screwed up tightly and he shook his head. “There’s no way.”

“I’m inclined to agree with Braxiatel,” Romana breathed out firmly. She pressed her hands into the mattress beside Phiroi and looked toward the Doctor through only a light tilt of her head. “Despite the power of a Prydonian’s telepathic mastery, there’s always a telepath more powerful who can fight against our will.” She held her hand up to the Doctor with a quick flick of her wrist. “Yes, I am aware of the power that both you and Braxiatel wield on a telepathic level. Your entire house has a gift in all three of the mental arts. But you must remember that Phennea is a direct descendent of Rassilon. She’s powerful enough to fight against even _Lungbarrow_ telepathic blocks, Doctor.” 

“A reset,” Braxiatel corrected with a quick look toward the Doctor. 

The Doctor shook his head. “No. Just a memory bock, Brax.”

“Is that _all_ you did?” Braxiatel said with a scoff. “You put in a _block_? I thought you did a full memory reset?”

The Doctor’s eyes closed in a slow blink. “I couldn’t, Brax. I just couldn’t.” He lifted his eyes to his brother; guilt was etched deeply inside his gaze. “I have limits…”

“Telepathically, no you don’t,” Braxiatel argued. “You have no equal. You out mastered Borusa in your first decade at the Academy. Koschei, the Rani, they couldn’t send out a hypnotic attack that you couldn’t counter and reverse.” He narrowed his eyes with a huff. “By Omega, you practically made a career of reversing Koschei’s hypnotic pranks at the academy.”

“I mean limitations due to conscience, Brax,” he snapped. “Mental intrusion is not something I take lightly. It’s filthy, underhanded business getting into someone’s mind without consent. I felt that in Phennea’s case, a block would be sufficient and hold until all of this…” he exhaled. “Until all of this madness was over.”

“Might’ve been nice for you to tell me that,” he said with a growl. “I would’ve finished the job for you.”

“Which is precisely _why_ I didn’t tell you.” The Doctor rubbed at his brow and let out a long sigh. “I don’t care what you think she’s guilty of, she doesn’t deserve to have their mind wiped like that – no one does.”

Braxiatel’s eyes blinked slowly, opening only enough to peer through narrowed slits of annoyance toward his brother. “She was going to kill the both of us and take your mate to Gallifrey as Rassilon’s little pet.”

“And she was stopped,” the Doctor answered with a huff.

“Clearly not,” he argued with a gesture toward the man laid out on the gurney. “I think Phiroi stands as proof of that, don’t you?” He sniffed deeply. “I almost killed a friend today because you – as usual – were too soft and didn’t—”

“Oh, will you shut up!” the Doctor snapped out. “This is not the time to talk about what could have been, what was done, and what should have been done. We need to focus on what we do now.”

“The Doctor’s right,” Romana stated firmly. “We need to look into just when Phennea was able to break through the telepathic blocks, and what kind of damage she was able to create behind the scenes.”

“Well,” Braxiatel muttered. “Rassilon isn’t here, which means at the very least, we haven’t been located.”

“I wouldn’t hold a lot of faith in that,” The Doctor reminded him with a lift of his eyes. “Could be that he’s just biding his time for now.”

“Or he’s aware of the resurrection and cure of more than a thousand Time Lords who have more than one bone to pick with him right now,” Romana offered. “Many of whom I am quite sure will take up arms against him if asked.”

“We don’t want that,” the Doctor said with a shake in his head. “Not at all. These people have already fought the war and done their part.”

“And we haven’t?”

The Doctor held up a finger. His mouth opened and then closed as though trying to find the right words to say. Ultimately, he didn’t, and merely expelled a light breath through his nose and shook his head. “I’ve got nothing.”

“If we have or if we haven’t,” Braxiatel ventured. “It’s really beside the point right now. I can write a security program that I can upload into each and every capsule on this planet. I will erase the whole rock from any surveillance or scanners.” He smirked a one-sided smile that was completely devoid of humour. “With one stroke of the keyboard we’d vanish completely.”

“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Rmana said quietly.

“And why not?”

“Because that would end up setting off alarms on Gallifrey.” the Doctor muttered. He scratched at this sideburn. “No, we’re better off…”

“Doing nothing,” Romana cut in. “We remain doing exactly what we have to this point. No rewriting protocols or programming, no change to any routine, no change at all.”

Braxiatel wasn’t thrilled by that order. “But…”

“But _nothing_ ,” she ordered with a lift in her finger. “As the Doctor said: anything unusual that comes from here right now _will_ set off alarms on Gallifrey. They _will_ be looking, I guarantee it.”

“It would really help if we knew exactly what was happening in the Capitol right now,” Braxiatel said coolly. “Having eyes and ears within the hallways of the presidential offices would certainly be a bonus for us.”

“Isn’t that why you have Narvin?” the Doctor queried. “Because he is eyes and ears on Gallifrey?”

“Even _his_ intelligence is limited,” Romana offered quietly. She flicked up a finger of warning to Braxiatel without looking at him. “Not a word, Brax.”

“That one was too easy to even bother with,” Braxiatel murmured. He exhaled. “Romana is right,” he agreed. “Narvin is a trusted member of council, and where he doesn’t have the information, he’ll certainly find it. But Rassilon – for all his idiocy and bat-shit craziness – he is a genius and knows exactly how to properly disseminate information so that everyone has a blind spot to something.”

“The only person who knows his plans in their entirety is him,” Romana added. 

The Doctor grunted with agreement, but chose not to actually voice any such agreements.

“There’s no one he trusts,” Romana said quietly. “So no one will know what we need to know.”

“That’s not entirely true,” Braxiatel said slowly. “There is one other…”

Both Romana and the Doctor looked at him with expectation. 

“However,” he drawled. “The chances are… well … they are quite slim that he will be of any help. I’m not completely sure that he’s …” He hummed to himself. “I’m not entirely sure even where he is right now.” He rubbed at his jaw, his focus now on the question inside his own mind. “It’s been a while since I’ve heard of or from him. But that means very little, doesn’t it?”

The Doctor watched his brother pace with impatient eyes. “Brax…”

Romana hushed him. “Let him think,” she warned gently. “When he gets like this, it’s really best not to interrupt him.” She offered the Doctor a weak smile of knowing. “Much like you.”

“I’m nothing like him,” the Doctor said with a light grump. He focused on Romana now that his brother was pacing, thinking, and murmuring to himself. He kept part of his ears trained on the sounds of thought coming from Braxiatel, but for the most part kept attention on Romana. “Did Phiroi say anything to you? Anything at all?”

She shook her head slowly. “Aside from being sure he wanted to challenge you for Rose…”

“Which is causing me a lot of concerned question,” he admitted. “How can he possibly think he could issue challenge? We – me and rose – already have a secure and unbreakable bond in place. We have since I was in my Eighth body on Gallifrey.”

“You don’t,” Romana drawled on a long voice. “We’ve already determined that your bond has been severed.”

“Which is something you seem to be unsurprised about,” he observed firmly. “Why is that, Romana?”

“Irrelevant,” she answered. 

“I disagree,” he said with a growl. “I find it highly relevant.” He drew in a deep breath. “What do you know?”

“Nothing more than you do,” she answered in a lie covered inside a sigh. “Nothing more than you…”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

A low groan from the man on the gurney in between them, and the question of the bond was immediately dropped. Romana looked down to Phiroi, her eyes wary, yet tender. “Are you alright?”

“Not entirely,” he answered with a croak in his voice. He lifted his hands to his nose, not surprised to see blood on his fingers when he pulled them back. “Although I am alive, which is admittedly quite astonishing. For a moment there, I honestly thought he was going to kill me.”

“I still might,” Braxiatel muttered distractedly. He didn’t look at the man, but he did point a finger at him. “You hurt my wife. Apologise.”

Phiroi rolled his head to the side to look toward her. “Did I hurt you?”

“I hurt myself,” she admitted with a light smile. “Trying to hurt you.”

“Trying to defend yourself,” he corrected with a wince as he slowly drew himself up to a seat. “There are not enough words in our language to convey just how sorry I am for that, my lady. Honestly, I couldn’t help it. I knew what I was doing. I knew that what I was saying was wrong, but I couldn’t fight it.”

“You were under a hypnotic trance,” the Doctor offered.

“Yes, I was aware of that,” he said with a long sigh. “The result of….” His face pinked just slightly and he looked upward to the ceiling with obvious regret. “It was Phennea.”

“How did you let her get that close to you?” the Doctor asked.

Romana’s eyes flashed at the pink on Phiroi’s cheeks. The method was immediately clear to her. She cleared her throat with mild discomfort. “Doctor, I don’t think that’s really pertinent.”

“Actually, Romana, it is,” he argued. “Hypnosis is short-range weaponry... Well … at least it always used to be. It is a rather terrifying thought to believe that Phennea has somehow managed to be able to amplify her telepathy.” He shuddered at an aggressive tingle of fear diving deeply down along his spine. “Imagine it…” His eyes flared. “Well, I don’t need to, really, do I? The Master managed to hypnotise an entire planet…”

“Using unnatural amplification methods,” Braxiatel reminded him almost distractedly as he continued to pace and consider his earlier quandary. “Koschei is, and always will be, a birthday part trickster. Nothing more powerful than that.”

“Don’t be too sure of that, Brax.” He huffed out a long breath. “And, I suppose, if Koschei can find means to amplify his ow abilities, it isn’t exactly out of the realm of possibility that Phennea is able to do the same.” His eyes widened with fear over awe. “And that. That’s a terrifying thought. Because she’s already _brilliant_ …”

“Are you nearing closure to your rant, Doctor?” Romana asked flatly.

“Not entirely,” he said with a dip in his head and a lift of a shrug in his shoulders. “I had more to say, but I think we’ve all gotten the point, yeah?”

“Phennea’s telepathic abilities aren’t any more amplified or effective than your own,” Phiroi said. “She was close enough to touching, which granted her access to be able to put me in a decent trance.”

“And how did she manage to get that close to you? Were you examining her?”

Phiroi cleared his throat against his fist. “Oh. Ehm…” 

Romana drew in a deep breath. “It may be for the best that we don’t push that line of questioning, Doctor,” she began with order in her tone. “We only need to know that contact was established, and therefore the hypnosis not amplified.”

Braxiatel let out a long moan. He wasn’t quite as clueless as his brother was acting himself to be. “Phiroi, really?”

“Can we not?” Phiroi pleaded with a growl in his tone. “As your wife said, it is irrelevant.” 

“What are all of you talking about?” At the tired and somewhat telling stares from three sets of eyes to his question, the Doctor’s eyes suddenly widened. He looked momentarily shocked, but did his best to hide it. “Oh. Oh. Yes, yes of course.” He held up his hand. “No need to elaborate.”

“I really had no intention of revealing _that_ much,” Phiroi replied with a light shake in his head. “I’m certainly not proud of it.”

“Understood,” the Doctor said with a lift in his hand and a wince on his face. He held both hands out in front of him, petting the air with open palms. “But I do wish to query: If you are…” he cleared his throat and winced even deeper. “If your, ehm, _needs_ are being met in such a manner, then why were you pushing so hard for my wife? Physical affection is not exactly a recreational sport for our people, it’s a precursor to full courtship and bonding.”

“Can we not continue with this?” Phiroi said with a moan as he dropped his face into his palm. He sniffed and lifted his head to look at the Doctor with a straight expression. “As for Rose…” He swallowed. “I need you to understand it was a desire born of hypnotic suggestion… Nothing more.”

“Woprat shit,” Braxiatel charged, still distracted and still pacing. “This isn’t exactly the first time you’ve displayed an inappropriate interest in my sister in law. In fact, we were discussing the unsuitable nature of your affections toward her only a few hours ago….”

“I have an interest and affection toward Rose, yes,” he admitted with a huff. His eyes shifted toward the Doctor, noting the pinch and the tic in his eyes toward that revelation. “However, I am very much aware of the love between you both, and that her heart – beautiful that it is – belongs to you and you alone.” He sniffed indignantly. “Not that you’re entirely worthy of it.”

“Let’s not go there,” Romana said quickly, hoping not to draw this conversation on for much longer than necessary and reveal too much. “We have a greater concern, which is Phennea, and what her plans are. I need to know what has she already released to Rassilon, and how much time we have to prepare to protect our people.”

“Unfortunately, I really can’t answer that,” Phiroi admitted. He looked pained. “Rassilon wasn’t exactly part of our, eh… He wasn’t exactly at the forefront of my mind in that moment.”

“I understand that but….” A light rukus at the door and she turned to look toward it. “What the?”

The door burst open and Narvin strode in, her eyes dark with frustration and annoyance combined. “Lord Sigma! Time you decided to claim your mate!” She dragged along with her a wide-eyed and horribly confused Rose Tyler. She stopped at the Doctor, then pulled Rose ahead of her, holding her by the arms to plop her directly in front of him. “Mind meld, now. Come on.”

“Mind meld?” Rose asked curiously.

“Oh, it’s better than the technical and rather long winded Gallifreyan term for it,” she replied with a long sigh. Her eyes fixed on the Doctor. “ _Now_. If you don’t mind.”

“Is there any particular reason you are so eager for me to reassert my marriage bond?” the Doctor answered slowly. “Right this minute?”

“Is there any reason you’re not?” Narvin replied with equal slowness.

“Yes. Forming a marriage bond is an extremely private, intimate affair,” the Doctor answered carefully. “While I am, indeed, eager to _claim my mate_ as you so simplistically put it, what you’re suggesting is that I telepathically make love to my wife right here and now, in the presence of everyone….”

“Which none of us want to see,” Braxiatel muttered with a curl in his lip. “Been there, done that, thank you.”

The Doctor gave his brother a somewhat confused expression. He’d witnessed _that_? “Right.” He looked back toward Narvin and shook his head. “Right at this moment, I’m going to say no. My hearts beat for my wife and making love with her is truly my greatest joy in the universe.” He smiled at Rose’s swoon and sigh. The smile fell. “But now is not the time. We have greater concerns right now.”

“Ahh,” Narvin conceded with a nod of her head. “Of course. I expect you’re discussing your ex-girlfriend and her little parlour trick.”

“Putting it mildly,” Romana said on a low voice.

“Not really,” Narvin said with a shrug as she walked around and took a seat on a gurney to the side of the one that Phiroi was sitting on. She gestured toward him. “He seems perfectly fine…” she circled her finger around her nose. “Except for that, of course. Nasty break, you might want to get that looked at.”

“Yes, I just might do that,” Phiroi drawled. “Thanks for your advice, might never have thought to do that without you suggesting it.”

“You’re welcome, although the facetiousness is a little much.”

“Warranted.”

She lifted her shoulders and looked upward to the ceiling. “Mildly.”

“You’re very calm, Narvin,” Romana noted with a critical eye.

Narvin tilted her head to one side and shrugged. “Shouldn’t I be?”

“No,” Romana replied slowly. “You’re usually the one most likely to panic than any of us. You aren’t. You’re calm. And I don’t think I like it.” She then pointed to her husband. “And you, Braxiatel. You’re far too quiet. You are as terrifying when you’re quiet as Narvin is when she’s completely calm.”

Braxiatel looked up with wide and innocent eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m far too … _what_? And I’m _what_ when I am?”

“You’re plotting and Narvin’s quietly smug.” Rose teased lightly as she turned to and took a step backward into the chest of the Doctor. She sighed contentedly when he immediately wrapped his arms around her from behind and pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “Which means bad things apparently, so stop it. The both of you. You’re scaring Romana.”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it _that_ way,” Romana said with a roll in her eyes. “Unnerving me, perhaps. Not _scaring_ me.” She looked at Narvin. “And just why are you looking so smug?”

“It’s my default expression,” she answered with a shrug. 

“No,” Romana corrected slowly. “Neutral and expressionless is your default setting.” She lifted her newly repaired arm to point a finger at her. “This is smug, as they say on Earth: You look like the cat who ate the bird.” Her eyes narrowed tightly. “And why is that? What have you done?”

“What I came here to do,” she answered with a light dip in her head and a one-sided smirk on her face. “Nothing more than that.” She drew in a deep breath. “And certainly nothing for you to be in any way concerned about.”

“With you,” Romana said cautiously. “I’m always concerned.”

Narvin’s eyes flicked toward Braxiatel. “With all due respect, if there is anyone that needs to bear any of your concern, it’s him. It is a rare moment that whatever he’s planning isn’t cause for concern.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Romana said with a long sigh. She looked toward Braxiatel, who was once again inside his own mind with thought. “Brax?”

At the sound of her voice calling to him, Braxiatel rubbed at his jaw and gave a firm nod of his head. It was quite clear that his mental battle strategy in his mind was now fully and thoroughly decided upon. “Right,” he drawled long. “I know what we need.”

“And what’s that?” Narvin murmured on an inhale that with obvious disinterest, as though she had already read the spoilers and knew exactly what was coming.

“K-9,” Braxiatel answered with a smile.

The Doctor lifted a brow, Romana’s eyes widened with obvious happiness. “K-9?” she queried on a high and wistful breath.

Braxiatel gave a firm nod. “As much as I do despise the little thing, I believe he can be most helpful in this situation.”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” Romana gushed out, her hands lifting to touch fingers to her lips to cover the smile spreading across her mouth. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen him.”

“Helpful in just what way?” the Doctor queried with a drop of both brows over his eyes. He still held onto his wife with tight, possessive arms and spoke past her temple. “K-9 has been missing for quite some time now. Even if you could locate his remains. I doubt he’d even be operational…” His lips pursed outward. “Well, that’s not to say I’m not capable of repairing him or blowing out the cobwebs from his circuitry. I’m fully capable of that. Of course I am. I just don’t quite see how he can be more help than two versions of Narvin, and a field full of TARDISes.”

“Narvin?” Romana asked with clear surprise.

“No one knows the workings of the Capitol better than Narvin does,” he said with a light shrug.

Narvin looked somewhat surprised by that. “I’m detecting a compliment there, Doctor… minor, though it may be.”

“Well, considering it’s your job to know absolutely everything that goes on across the hallways of Gallifrey’s Capital,” the Doctor said with a smirk against Rose’s head as his arms tightened just a little bit. “I’m just assuming you’re doing a good job of it.”

“Oh, I know so much more than you think I do,” she said on a voice full of warning. “So, so much more, Lord Sigma.” Her eyes flicked to Rose then back to him. “So much more.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he asked hotly.

“Nothing,” she answered with a smile.

“I really don’t like what you’re insinuating right now.”

“Which is _what_ , exactly?” Her smile was wide. “Guilty conscience, Doctor?”

Romana huffed out impatiently. “Narvin, stop it. Doctor, ignore her.” Her eyes widened with warning toward rising frustration when she saw Narvin point toward her eyes with her middle and forefingers, then point toward the Doctor with both fingers. _Always watching_ was mouthed through a smile. “Narvin. What did I just say?”

She looked toward Romana with her brows high. “I’m not entirely sure, Romana. I wasn’t listening.”

“Clearly not,” Romana growled. She looked toward Braxiatel. “Your brother does bring up a point. K-9 has been missing for quite some time.”  
  


“Not _missing_ ,” Braxiatel answered slowly. “Well. Not as such, anyway.”

“You know where he is?”

Braxiatel nodded slowly. “Yes. I had him integrated into the networks of the Capitol shortly before Rassilon was resurrected.” He exhaled hard and a look of disgust crossed his features. “I knew our time of power would be very limited after Rassilon rose again to power…”

“But you didn’t want to be kept uninformed,” the Doctor ventured dryly.

“Turns out,” Braxiatel said with a sigh. “That I was unable to create the link between that robot dog and my capsule.” He sniffed rather indignantly. “Ran out of time.”

“But you know where to find him?” Romana asked with uncharacteristic eagerness in her voice. “And he can be retrieved?”

“Well, yes,” Braxiatel answered carefully. “It will just take a quick flight to Gallifrey. I can materialise, retrieve the dog, head back here.”

“Are you sure that’s safe?” Rose asked with definite worry in her voice. “I mean this Rassilon guy, he’s on the hunt for you.”

Braxiatel snorted in a single exhale of a laugh. “Evading Lord Rassilon? Easy.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” she groused. “I don’t like this plan. I don’t like you putting yourself in danger just to retrieve the dog. Can’t you just ask Narvin to bring him back here?” She looked to Narvin’s future. “You’re on Gallifrey right now, yeah?”

Narvin’s face creased up. “Yes. But.” She exhaled. “What I’m dealing with on Gallifrey right now…” she shook her head. “It’s a little more urgent than retrieving a tin dog.”

Braxiatel looked toward her with a lift in his brows. “And just what might that be?”

“None of your business,” she snapped with clear warning in her tone. “So, don’t ask.”

“Well, I really don’t’ care what you’re up to right now,” the Doctor said with a shake of his head. “It doesn’t affect me in any way…”

“Right,” Narvin drawled long. “Nothing to do with you. Not. At. All.”

He returned Narvin’s words with a glare past Rose’s ear. “I don’t think retrieving K-9 is a good idea at all. In fact, it’s a terrible idea.”

“But it’s the _right_ idea,” Narvin offered. All sets of eyes fell on her and she lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “As much as it pains me to admit: Brax is right. The only one outside of Rassilon who knows everything about Rassilon and his plans is K-9. I know what Braxiatel did back during the war. The robot dog’s brain was fully integrated into Gallifreyan systems. This was successfully completed shortly before Rassilon ascended from the tomb. As a result of this integration the robot knows more about the Capitol than anyone right now.” She pointed to herself. “Including me.”

Braxiatel smirked victoriously. “So, all we need to do is to make a quick flight back to Gallifrey, retrieve his electronic brain from the network, pop it back into his doggie-like structure, and bring him back here.”

The Doctor’s brows tightened. “And none of this sounds like it is a bad idea to you, Brax?”

“No,” he drawled slowly.

“No really,” the Doctor pressed on. “Think long and hard about what you just said and tell me at which point any of this seems like a good idea.”

“A minor inconvenience if anything,” he answered with a roll in his eyes. “But not a _bad_ idea.”

“No, of course not,” he said slowly. He then looked toward Narvin. “And you?”

“I am in agreement with Braxiatel,” Narvin said quickly. She then paused and started to cough rather violently. After a long moment where it appeared that she might not quite recover from it, she punched at her chest and cleared her throat. “Well, that tasted absolutely terrible on the back of my throat. I think I’ve found myself in agreement with you far too many times today. My physiology is fighting against that.”

“Very funny,” Braxiatel drawled long. He then looked to bis brother. “Come with me or don’t, and I would like to assume that you will accompany me… But I _am_ going to stop off on Gallifrey to retrieve the computer unit.”

“You won’t make it out of there alive,” the Doctor warned him. “You know that he … Rassilon … is just waiting for you to do something as stupid as to return to Gallifrey because you’re too damn arrogant and self assured to stay away.”

“I’ll go with you,” Narvin offered.

The Doctor was aghast. “You as well? Have both of you completely lost your minds?”

“Not entirely sure that he ever actually had one,” Narvin replied with a light smile. The smile fell toward neutrality as she pushed off the edge of the gurney and walked toward the brothers. She looked first at the Doctor and then to Braxiatel. “If I’m with you, you might have a better chance of getting out in one piece.”

“And why is that?”

“Because of the three of us, I am the only one who knows the hallways and each of the hidden passageways of that building.” Her eyes flicked to Romana. “Not even _she_ knows what I do…” her voice quietened. “None of you do.”

“I don’t know that I like the way you said that,” the Doctor noted quietly.

“Without me,” Narvin returned after a sigh. “Neither of you will make it out. Trust me.”

“Your younger self is currently on Gallifrey,” the Doctor said with a pinch in his eye. “Why don’t we just tell him we’re coming and have him meet us there?”

“Because he’s readying to Gallifrey right now,” she answered with a huff. “He’s on a mission of a different and extremely important manner.”

“Which is?”

“Something I’m not disclosing to you right now,” she shot back. “But he is not available to you.” She smirked. “Which means you’re stuck with me.”

Braxiatel pressed his lips together and nodded once. “Fine. I’m fine with that. Shall we take my capsule?” He looked to his brother. “Well? Are you coming, or will you stay here?”

The Doctor’s entire face creased into a wince. He dropped his forehead onto Rose’s shoulder and let out a long moan. “Fine. I’m coming. But we take the TARDIS.”

“Yeah,” Braxiatel drawled facetiously. “The most inconspicuous and unrecognizable ship in the entire universe. What a _terrific_ idea…”

“My TARDIS, or we don’t go.”

Braxiatel closed his eyes and drew in a long breath. He opened his eyes on his exhale and looked to Narvin. “We really need him?”

“We do, I’m afraid.”

“Right.” He pointed his finger at his brother. “Then if I’m going to acquiesce I need to make a few adjustments and enhancements to your ship first. Once I am quite satisfied we will be invisible, then we can head out.” He looked between Narvin and the Doctor. “Well? Sound good?”

“How long do you expect that to take?” the Doctor queried.

Braxiatel looked upward to the ceiling. He set his hands on his hips and seemed to be counting. After a moment he lowered his head and looked to his brother with a tired gaze. “Probably a couple to three hours. Why?”

The Doctor turned his head to look down at his wife’s face. “There’s probably something I should do before I leave.”

Rose wasn’t looking up. Her eyes were on Braxiatel. “I’m not comfortable with this.”

“Thete will be fine. I’ll make sure of it.”

“Can you really make me that promise, Brax?” she queried. “Cause, I just got him back. I’m not ready to lose him again.”

The Doctor kissed against her ear. “I’ll be fine, Rose. I promise you.” He turned her in his arms and loosely held his arms around her back. He looked down into her face with a smile. “You trust me, don’t you?”

“Yes, but…”

“I’ll be fine.” He kissed the centre of her brow. “We’ll all be fine.”

“Fine,” she said with a light whimper. “If you’ve got to do it, then …. Be right back, yeah? Like, a minute after you leave.” She pointed to Braxiatel. “In fact, let your brother drive, yeah? He’s pretty good at not being late, unlike you. Always on time, him.”

“Well,” Braxiatel said with a lightly sheepish expression. “There was this one time, when I erred to the tune of an entire century…”

“I’m sorry?” She barked out with panic. “What?”

“But it hasn’t happened before, nor since,” he assured her. “Recalibration of the old girl, and it was fine.”

“Oh no….”

“I promise you, Rose,” Braxiatel vowed. “Back in a jiffy.” He gestured toward his wife, lowering his hand to indicate her womb. “I don’t want to miss a moment of that, be assured of it.”

“Fine,” she whimpered. She clutched at the Doctor’s arms to keep them held tightly around her. “Fine. Just. All of you come home, yeah? Don’t make us girls have to be the ones to come and save you, yeah?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Braxiatel assured her. He then smiled and looked between the Doctor and Narvin. “So … To Gallifrey, then. Should be fun…”

“Your idea of fun and mine do differ quite dramatically,” Narvin said with a deep sigh.

Braxiatel smiled toward his old friend. He then looked toward his brother. “Thete. You said you had something you wished to do before we leave?”

The Doctor nodded firmly. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“And I expect it involves your mate?” He gestured toward Rose, who looked a little perplexed. “Then now might be a good time, don’t you think?” 

He grinned widely. “Oh, yes. Yes. Absolutely so.”

Rose frowned with question. “And what might that be?”

The Doctor picked her up off the floor to hold her in his arms, laying her out in between their span. He curled his arms tightly around her and kissed against her temple. He then whispered words against her temple that had her shuddering and sighing inside his hold.

When she drew in a breath to reply he shook his head. “Ehm. Best you save your response until we’re … ehm … in a more private setting…” He jogged, rather than walked, toward the doorway. He paused just shy of the door. “How long, Brax?”

“We leave in three hours. With or without you.”

“Brilliant….”

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~


	73. Questions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor notices something new about Rose ... and has questions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 23 days ago, I quit smoking. 23 days....
> 
> You know what happened when I did that? I almost immediately lost my drive to do absolutely anything except to hate everything around me. I couldn't write, I couldn't create, I couldn't read, I couldn't sit still ... I couldn't do anything. I tried, don't get me wrong ... I just couldn't remain focused at all. I couldn't even find the will to write this!
> 
> But now, I think I may have found my mojo again. I think I have.... I'm thinking about writing again. I'm wanting to write again. I'm finding my energy to race fingers across the keyboard to get it done.
> 
> Fingers crossed it only gets better from here....
> 
> A WARNING for this chapter: It is very racy. It's not smut, though. There's some heavy petting of sorts, and there is a lot of nakedness, but no actual part A into slot B nookie. Do be warned if that's not quite your thing ... it's also a bit on the mushy sappy side. I was reminded that I seem to be focusing a little more on Romana and Brax than I am on the Doctor and Rose, so this is my reparation for that. :)
> 
> I very much hope you enjoy my return to writing.... Looking forward to next week when the lads (and lady Narvin) get themselves into mischief.

~~ooooOOOOoooo~~

Held inside a haze of post coital bliss and surrounded in the musky aroma of lovemaking, Rose Tyler leaned back on the headboard of the bed she shared with the Doctor. She held the thin pink top sheet up over her naked chest and watched as her husband walked one end of the room to the other and then back again. Clearly distracted, he wore nothing except his brown pinstriped trousers as he murmured in low Gallifreyan under his breath. He would grab one article of clothing from a chair back or the wardrobe, wander across the room without putting it on, then wander back across to collect another item.

Rose watched him with a light pinch in her brow. Her mind swam with the essence of him as their bond fully reasserted itself, but the euphoria she had been anticipating from it was lacking. She could feel unease and question from his side of the bond, which was quite effective in muddying the euphoria she was _supposed_ to be feeling.

This wasn’t what their _honeymoon_ was supposed to be like. He should be whistling happily … Singing even.

But he wasn’t, and Rose didn’t like that one bit.

“Are you alright?” she asked after a long moment of observation, and when he was on his third walk back to the wardrobe for yet another Oxford.

“Yeah,” he answered distractedly. “Yeah. I’m alright.”

“You sure?” she pressed gently, pulling up her knees under the sheet to rest her elbow on them. She clutched at her fringe with one hand and kept a tight hold on the sheet with the other. “Because you really do seem like there’s something on your mind.”

He let out a light snort that was as much a laugh as it was a snort. “I’m about to head to Gallifrey with my bullheaded brother and a future incarnation of Narvin to retrieve a robot that may or may not be operational.” He drew in a breath. “If any one of us is discovered, we’ll be cycled through all of our regenerations and ….” He smirked and looked to the floor, adopting a robotic voice to finish that sentence. “Exterminated.”

“Then don’t go,” Rose ventured softly. She knew full well that he wouldn’t step away from this little adventure, but she felt it prudent to at least make the suggestion. “Stay here with me, with the kids. Be safe and _not_ exterminated with us.”

He lifted his eyes to hers and gave her a smile. There was no humour or even happiness within the upward curl of the edges of his mouth, but there was reverence inside his gaze. “I want nothing more in the universe than to do just that, Rose.” He walked to the end of the bed and pressed a hand against one of the intricately carved and towering cadonwood posts on the corner. He looked her over with a smile on his face, this time wearing a smile of contentment. “After what we just did: reaffirming, reasserting our bond.” He let out a long whimpering sound of need. “Neither of us should be leaving our bed at all. At least not for the next week, anyway.”

“And who’d be tending to the children, then?” Rose asked with a teasing glint in her eye and an upward curl of the very edge of her mouth. “Or do we expect them to fend for themselves while their daddy … ehm …” she blushed and chuckled.

“While their daddy _what_?” the Doctor questioned with a smile as he took his hand from the post and pressed it into the mattress. There was a sly and cheeky grin on his face as he slowly crawled up the mattress toward where she was seated. “Hmmmm?”

Rose reddened but smiled toward his slow and purposeful approach. “Well.”

He breathed out through his toothy smile as he crawled up close enough to touch his nose to hers. While he was close enough to press lips against hers, he kept himself just out of reach of her. “While I do what, Rose?”

“You know exactly what you’d be up to,” she breathed out as she attempted to capture his pouty bottom lip.

He evaded her with a low chuckle. “And you don’t plan of being an active participant?”

“Oh, shut up,” she said with a chuckle and a shake in her head. She snapped her hand up to hook it around the back of his neck. With a growl she claimed his mouth with hers, holding him firmly in place as she completely plundered the inside of his mouth with her tongue.

He was still on his hands and knees in front of her, and despite holding that position, the kiss he returned to her was with passion and fierceness equal to hers. The touch of her hand and nails raking over his shoulder and down his back had him shudder and emit a sound from deep within his chest. He shifted forward on his knees and slid an arm to snake around her waist and up across her back. He sealed his mouth more firmly over hers and pulled her chest up against his. Her breasts were naked and soft against his chest, her belly against his. So much naked skin against skin, and his mind became close to overwhelmed completely with hers. A myriad of different emotions passed across their link: Love, lust, want, need, reverence, adoration…. Everything he felt toward her being thrust so messily back at him. The sloppy mess of emotions she shared, and the oh so human lack of control and precision toward him, it poked at the most primal part of him, and in very short order, he tugged his hold on her back to pull her down along the mattress and through the space between his parted knees.

“By the Gods, you’re magnificent,” he vowed with low fierceness in his tone. “My hearts are not worthy of you.”

She wriggled down the inches he was unable to reach with his initial pull of her small body underneath his. “That’s my decision to make,” she said with a fired look upward into his eyes. Her hands slid underneath the waist band of his trousers to press the tips of her fingers into the soft rise of his backside in a squeeze. “Not yours.”

He dropped on top of her with a low growl in the back of his throat. He quickly claimed her mouth with his, angling his head in such a way that he was sealed tightly over her. He could barely form any breathy kind of sound, but he certainly passed a growl from his throat into hers as he shifted his weight to find the part between her legs to settle there.

There were moments she tried to break free of his kiss, to possibly take a deep breath, but he refused to give her the freedom she was seeking. By the Gods, he found himself physically unable to release her. His head chased each movement of hers, his hands slid and held at her. He wanted to bring them back together as one and struggled to free himself from his trousers in order to do so. 

His respiratory bypass kicked in after a moment. The tightness inside his chest that came from being unable to draw in a breath released quickly and he felt the elevation and relief in his shoulders from it. For a moment longer, he continued his airless ministrations and fumbling of the fastening of his trousers without thought toward the woman writhing below him.

Writhing. But not in a panicked way.

Such was the blinding power she had over his mind and body, it dawned on him far too slowly than it should have to realise that Rose should be struggling for air. She should be close to suffocating completely underneath his possessive and thoughtless passions.

He stilled completely and opened his eyes to look down toward her. He expected a red face, possibly purple. He expected her to be completely panicked and close to passing out. The expression that looked back up at him, however, was the opposite of what he was expecting. Her face was pink with lust, her eyes hooded and dark with desire. She was unaffected by the lack of oxygen she had to be suffering. If he was at the point where his own bypass needed to kick in, then she should be unconscious.

With a slow and controlled movement, he separated their lips without so much as a sound. He pressed his hands into the mattress beside her breasts and lifted his chest upward to look down at her with an expression that was a mix of confusion, of awe, and of fear.

“Rose?” he questioned on a hoarse whisper.

She blinked and rolled her shoulders just slightly; uncomfortable with the analytical stare he gave her. She looked away from him. “Doctor? What’s wrong?”

“Look at me,” he ordered quietly.

She shook her head slowly and exhaled his name.

“Look at me,” he repeated firmly. 

“Doctor, please,” she pleaded softly, still squirming under his stare. She didn’t feel quite easy with being looked at as though she was his puzzle of the day. “Don’t look at me like that, yeah? It makes me feel uncomfortable.”

He blinked his hard and analytical stare to soften his focus more toward gentle curiosity. “Right,” he breathed out. His chin dropped to his chest. “Of course. I’m sorry.”

All she could see now was the very top of his head, and the lightly sweated mess of spikes that were starting to droop just slightly in their silent request for a wash. She blew out a breath against the tallest of the spikes. “I guess this means the moment’s gone, yeah?”

He dropped a kiss to the centre of her collarbone and nodded slowly. “I’m sorry.”

Rose curled both hands around his head and gently pulled his head down to rest against her chest. When she felt his ear against the rise of her breast, she sighed and stroked at his head. “You’re really worried about this trip with Brax and Narvin, aren’t you?”

“I am,” he admitted after a purr to her ministrations. He nuzzled his ear against her breast and let out a long sigh. “But, not as worried as you think I am. I’ve been to worse, dealth with worse people than Rassilon, and walked out unscathed.” He drew in a breath. “And if this – even in some small way – helps our people to return to Gallifrey, then it’s worth it.”

Rose leaned her head back heavily into her pillow. She continued to stroke at his hair, holding him against her chest and belly, inside the part of her legs. “Brax won’t let anything happen to you,” she said softly. 

“It’s not me I’m worried about,” he admitted with little more than a whisper. 

“You’re worried about your brother?”

“Yeah.”

Rose drew in a breath. “So am I.”

“More than you are me?” he questioned with a slight smile that she could feel against her breast.

“I trust you,” she revealed after a swallow. “I know how you are in these situations and I trust that you’ll walk away … strut … swagger …”

He let out a moan. “Oh, please don’t accuse me of swaggering.”

She chuckled through her nose. The chuckle petered out to a sigh. “Brax, though. He … He’s angry.”

“Furious,” the Doctor corrected her gently, his eyes locked on the pebbled brown apex of her breasts.

“Very much so,” she agreed. “And from what I know of him, when Brax is furious, he becomes dangerous.” She scratched lightly at his head. “And put you in the mix, his little brother…”

“I hate that he still thinks he needs to protect me like that,” he huffed against her breast. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.” Another huff. “I don’t know why he thinks he needs to be sentinel all of a sudden. I’ve been looking after myself for centuries without his help.”

“Centuries you wouldn’t have had if it weren’t for him,” Rose said almost distractedly with her eyes on the swooping folds of the soft fabric that was draped across the posts of their large bed. 

“Don’t give him that much credit,” he groused in a voice so low that she felt the rumble of it through her breast.

“You wouldn’t have made it off Gallifrey in the first place if it wasn’t for him,” she offered with a light writhe underneath him. 

“Meaning what?” he mumbled.

“You should ask him,” she answered with a light sigh. Her fingers raked lightly through his hair and around the shell of his ear. She could feel the tremor of contentment within him at her actions. “And ask him who the Burner was that he warned you about.”

She felt his swallow at that. “How do you know about Burners, Rose?”

“Because the version of you who tried to kill me at the Collection…” she drew in a long breath. “The alternate you. He was a Burner. Sent by his Romana to kill our Romana.”

The Doctor’s head shot up fast. The look he gave her was one of absolute and unhidden terror. “I _was_ … I mean: _he_. He was a Burner?”

Rose nodded slowly. “Yeah. In an earlier incarnation … um .. curly blonde hair, arrogant and pompous…”

“Technicoloured?”

She smiled wide. “You know the one?”

His fear and horror fell toward amusement. “Considering I was him, yes, I know him.” His eyes fell to her throat, and to the purple finger marks that still stained her skin. “Which explains that method of attack. I did seem to rush toward throttling in that body.”

“Glad you grew out of that, then,” she said with humour that didn’t quite make him smile. Her own smile fell to know that he wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have to head off on a dangerous adventure. She exhaled long and lifted her hand to run the backs of her fingers along his jaw. “I love you, Doctor.”

“Quite right,” he replied softly and without a smile. His gaze was firm on hers. Firm, and concerned. 

“Well?” she queried with her brows high and her lips firmly pulling to a purse.

“Well, what?” he queried curiously.

“Well…” she swallowed thickly. “Do you love me as well?” She heavily drew her thumb along his cheekbone. “Because when your lover…”

“My wife,” he corrected her.

“Yeah, okay. When your wife tells you she loves you, then generally, she’s hoping you’ll return the sentiment.”

“My hearts beat for you,” he vowed softly.

Rose groaned out with frustration and squirmed to pull herself out from under him. “Never mind,” she said with a sigh. “If I have to prod you to say it, it kind’ve loses its majesty, yeah.”

“I should go without saying,” he ventured. “But if I must confirm: My hearts beat for you, I love you, I adore you. You’re my universe and every dimension that exists within and even outside it…”

Rose rolled her eyes and let out a long humph. “Well,” she muttered as she rolled out from underneath him completely and settled herself on her stomach at his side instead. “be still my heart. Such a romantic man, aren’t you? Don’t know if I can handle it.”

Now laid on his side he propped up on an elbow and traced his eyes over her naked form; over each one of her soft and beautiful curves. “It is my greatest wish that one day I can adequately convey to you just how magnificent you are to me, and just how much my hearts beat for you.” He drew the tip of his finger down along the length of her spine. The shudder she gave in response made him smile, then lean forward to press his lips into the small dip between her shoulder blades. “I just can never find words to perfectly justify the true depths of my feelings toward you.”

He drew in a deep breath and rolled on his hip to lay with his back in the mattress. “I speak eight billion languages, Rose. And none of them have the right words.”

She rolled her head on the pillow to look across at him. “Not even inside your own perfectly beautiful, lyrical language?” she questioned. “I can think of plenty of words that were made for how I feel for you.”

He rolled his head to look at her. “And what are those?”

She rolled to her side and shuffled toward him. Soft lyrics in an ancient tongue dripped off her lips to sing against his ear. Her lips brushed against his ear as she spoke the words of love and devotion within his own language. She nuzzled her nose against the shell of his ear when she saw his eyes close and his mouth drop lightly to exhale a light moan. She ran the flat of her palm down along his belly to his navel. She traced the tip of her finger around the small divot on an otherwise perfectly smooth belly. “Don’t tell me yours isn’t a romantic language that can’t express love and devotion in its purest form.” 

“By the Gods,” he breathed out with a light writhe against the mattress. “I’ve never heard Gallifreyan spoken quite like that.”

“I certainly hope not,” she replied with a light chuckle. She bit at her bottom lip and pressed her hand down onto his belly to give just enough of a dip to be able to slide her fingers underneath the waistband of his trousers. “Because no one but me is allowed to say that to you.”

When she took him in her hand, the Doctor clutched hard at the rumpled bedsheet with one tight fist and lifted his head off the mattress to exhale a long moan. Rose quickly shifted to nestle herself firmly against his side. She curled her other arm underneath and around his head to drag her nails through his hair. She continued to speak Gallifreyan words of devotion against his ear, smiling at the desperate way he moaned out her name. He dropped his head back down onto her arm and tilted his head toward her, his gaped mouth parted in a long moan that only half managed to attempt a reply to her careful phrasing. Only a single word made it past his lips. His arm snatched outward to clutch at her thigh.

Rose watched the lines of his profile contorting, stretching, and tightening with each movement of her hand inside his trousers. Each movement, and each crease in his cheeks and within the corners of his eyes seemed only to make him so much more desirable to her, and she fought against her own sudden need to move over him. Her body shuddered and her hand shook as her fingers carded through his hair and dragged across his temple.

She felt him still completely at that small and tender touch. His breath caught and held deeply inside his chest.

“Do … do that again,” he stammered breathlessly.

She wasn’t entirely sure if she liked just how still he’d become. Her hand moving against him inside his trousers had lost all effect. She stopped stroking him, but kept her hand cupped around him. “Do what?” she asked him after a swallow.

“My mind,” he rushed out. His eyes were wide and manic, and locked on her face. “You were in my mind.”

“Yeah,” she answered slowly. “That’s the bond, yeah? I’m supposed to be in there.”

“Not like that,” he whispered out. “Not like you just were…” He rolled his head to face away from her. His eyes shifted up to the tips of her fingers that dangled just off the ends of his fringe. He quickly lifted his hand to snatch those fingers inside his palm. He pressed them against his temple and held them there as he turned his face back to hers. “Do it again.”

“Do what?” she questioned with a pinch of confusion in her eyes. “I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

“What you just did,” he answered her with light frustration in his voice. He pressed her fingers a little more firmly against his temple. “Inside me. You were inside me, inside my mind.”

“Don’t be daft,” she said with a shake in her head. “You know I can’t. Not without you pulling me in.”

“But you did,” he said with urgency in his voice. “You just did.”

“I didn’t,” she corrected him with her own frustration. 

“You did,” he pushed.

She closed her eyes and let out a moan. “You know what. Maybe you should get dressed and meet up with Brax…”

“Not yet,” he said low. “Not yet. I want you to try again. I want you inside me.”

“That’s what I’m supposed to say to you,” she said with a sigh. Her head shook slowly. “I can’t, Doctor.”

“You can,” he barked out. “You just did. Now, Rose. Do it again!”

“I can’t.”

“You can!”

With a curl in her lip she let out a long groan and closed her eyes. Knowing how muted their connection really was due to her human non-telepathic nature, Rose drew in a deep breath and gathered together every single heated emotion within her. She grit her teeth together and fired the entirety of them toward him.

The Doctor’s back arched off the bed completely and his mouth fell open wide as he belched out a long groan. His hand fisted hard at the bed sheet, and his fingers slid between hers to clutch tightly at the fingers she held on his temple.

Rose could have been forgiven for worrying that her husband was in pain, or that their connection was providing extreme discomfort over any form of pleasure – such was the depth and length of his groan – but she had seen him in this posture and position before. This was not pain nor discomfort. This was pleasure on an elevated level. She let her eyes shift to where her fingers were connected with his temple and licked at her lip as she sent through the most salacious thought she was capable of thinking.

He groaned out long a series of words she didn’t immediately register. She had her eyes closed and was enjoying the feel of renewed life within his trousers. She made quick work of letting him know she was definitely keen to enjoy that renewed life with slow strokes of her hand.

“How … how are you doing this?” he croaked out after a moment.

Rose’s immediate thought was that he was talking about her hand inside his pants, and she looked downward with an upward tilt to her brows. “Um…”

“I mean my mind,” he corrected her mind’s question. “You’re not supposed to be able to do this.”

“You’re not supposed to be coherent right now, either,” she ventured with a sigh. It looked like this was not going to go in any pleasurable direction from here. He was intrigued, and not in a good way. “But here we are.”

Rose pulled her hand free of his trousers and rolled onto her back to flop heavily into the mattress. She wasn’t surprised that her movement onto her back seemed to telepathically pull him from his back and onto his side to face her.

“How are you able to do that?” he questioned on a low and very suspicious voice.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered with her eyes rolled back as far as they could go. “Maybe Brax’s tempering of my mind made me telepathic like him.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” he breathed out curiously. His eyes pinched analytically as he searched her face.

“Of course, it doesn’t,” she said with a sigh. “It never does, does it?”

He was silent, but only for a short moment. “What happened to you at the collection?” he asked after a moment. “What really happened while you were there?”

She rolled her eyes and sat up, drawing the sheet to cover at her chest. With a huff, she flicked the sheet off herself and slid off the bed and onto her feet. “Why don’t you just ask what you want to ask, Doctor? Ask me the right question so I can give you the answer you’re actually looking for instead of stumbling to try and figure it out.”

“You’re different,” he managed darkly as he watched her collect her discarded clothing from the floor to redress. “And I don’t mean slightly so, I mean you. All of you. You smell different. You taste different, you feel different.” He swallowed. “You can reach inside me like you’ve never been able to do before. Why?”

Rose closed her eyes as she pulled on her shirt and sucked in a deep breath. She knew the answer to that question. She knew exactly what was so different about her. How she thought he wouldn’t be able to sense it; she had no idea at all. The Doctor was constantly cataloguing and categorising everything about her. He was bound to notice a complete change in physiology. She exhaled and leaned forward to pull on her trousers. “It’s been a while since we’ve been intimate, Doctor.”

“We’ve made love a couple of times since I returned,” he reminded her. 

“Surface lovemaking only,” she stated as she sat heavily on the edge of the mattress and pulled on her socks. “Today was the first time we ….” She swallowed. “That we _really_ made love … like we used to back when we were on Gallifrey. With our minds as one.” She looked toward him. “It’s been a few centuries for you, perhaps you just forgot what we are actually capable of together.”

“If you think for a second that I can ever possibly forget any part of what it’s like to make love to you, Rose,” he said flatly. “That every single moment of that isn’t seared vividly in my mind…”

She laughed. “Up until a couple of months ago, you didn’t remember any of it.”

“That’s not fair,” he breathed out with hurt.

“It’s true, though.”

“I don’t want to fight with you,” he said carefully.

“Then just leave it, please, Doctor.” She exhaled and slouched in her seat, looking toward the far wall with a low dip in her shoulders. “I don’t have the magical answer you’re looking for as to why I might feel different to you. All I can say is that … That it’s been a long time since we’ve had full connection between us.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“Believe it or don’t,” she said with a shrug and a slap of her hands on her thighs to draw herself to a stand. “I don’t know what you want me to say to you.” She walked toward the centre of the room to pick up her jacket from the floor. “Maybe its all part of this Huon thing that Brax says I have. Who knows?”

“Can I do some tests?”

“No,” she answered firmly.

“Why not?” He drew in a breath. “Let me make sure you’re okay?”

“Lord Phiroi has my medical files, ask him.” She sniffed. “I’ll let him know you have my permission to peruse my entire medical history.”

He stood and walked toward her quickly. “Rose, please.”

She turned to face him. “I don’t know what more you want me to say or do.”

“Med Bay,” he said urgently. “A couple of vials of blood, a quick scan with the TARDIS’…”

A hard banging on the door cut his words off completely. Braxiatel’s voice boomed from the other side. “Are you about done in there, Thete?”

Both Rose and the Doctor answered at the same time.

“He’ll be right there, Brax.”

“No, I’m not. I need another hour.”

The handle to the door jiggled, twisted, and the door opened. Braxiatel popped his head into the room. He looked at Rose, fully dressed, and then to his brother wearing only his trousers. “Ahh. I appear to be interrupting something.”

“No,” Rose said with a shrug in her shoulders and a smile on her face. “The Doctor’s just been bitten by the curiosity bug, that’s all. It’s nothing that can’t wait until you guys get back from Gallifrey.”

“Is that to say you’ll let me perform my tests when we get back?” the Doctor questioned her with a pinch in his eye and a tilt in his head.

Braxiatel stepped into the room completely. His eyes looked upon his sister in law with much the same piercing analytics as the Doctor. “Is everything alright?”

“Perfectly alright,” Rose said with a smile. “Thete’s just being his typical overprotective self. I sniff and sneeze, he frets.”

“Are you quite sure?” Braxiatel asked cautiously. 

“Very,” she assured him. “Now. Both of you have a mission to complete, and I want the both of you back in one piece before dinner, okay?”

“Are you cooking?” Braxiatel asked with a wink in his eye.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. She turned to the Doctor and softened her expression toward affection as she circled her arms around his neck. “I love you,” she vowed fiercely. “Come home to me, and together we’ll find the answers you need, yeah?”

“Promise me that,” he pleaded. 

“I promise,” she said with a smile. “Now. Kiss me, Doctor, so you can get on your way and come home quick.”

His arms shifted around her back and he dipped his head to claim her in a searing kiss that lifted her feet off the floor and curled her toes inside her socks. He reduced her to a panting, gasping state and set her feet back on the floor. A couple of carefully spaced out kisses ended their connection and allowed her to regain her senses again.

“Wow,” she gushed with a stagger backward. She touched at her lips with her fingertips and pointed to the door. She gulped. “I guess. I guess I should go, yeah?”

“My hearts beat for you,” he vowed with a light bow in his head.

“And mine for you,” she returned with a smile. She looked to Braxiatel and touched her fingers to his chest as she passed by. “And I love you, too, Brax. Keep the both of you safe for me?”

“I’ll do my best,” he vowed with a smile and a light dip of his head. “You are in my hearts.”

He held his head low in a dip until she’d walked out of the room, then lifted up tall and took a quick look toward his brother. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Is it something that can wait, or do you need to stay here and find out?”

The Doctor thumbed at his nose. “I …” He exhaled. “I think it can wait. I’m probably just over reacting. Reaching…. Hoping.” 

“For what?”

“Nothing,” he answered. He then gestured toward the door. “Let me finish dressing. I’ll meet you in the console room in five minutes. The sooner we leave, the sooner we get back.”

“Perfect,” Braxiatel said with a nod. He drew in a deep breath and held it a moment. He spoke on a slow exhale. “I really hope we know what we’re doing, Thete.”

“I don’t think we do,” he replied low. “I really don’t.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	74. Break Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narvin rescues Donna and MArtha

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not much to say here except: I really hope this was worth the wait....
> 
> I hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

The hallways were dark. Not that he didn’t expect less illumination inside these hallways – this was the prison cell wing of the Capitol after all – but he certainly hadn’t considered damp alongside the darkness. It was a little too far on one end of the spectrum of cliché for Narvin to so readily accept.

“What happened down here?” he intoned darkly. His chin was low, but his gaze high. “Why do I feel like I’m walking through a medieval dungeon on Earth rather than the Agency Gaols on Gallifrey?”

“I have no idea what you mean by _Medieval_ ,” Ansel remarked somewhat coolly. “Surprised that you do, honestly.”

“I’ve … _travelled_ here and there.” Narvin looked around with a slow sweep of his eyes rather than look at Ansel directly. He drew in a deep breath to exhale a huff before speaking. One thing was obvious, and the CIA Coordinator couldn’t help but remark on it. “The heat has been shut off from this section of the gaol,” he noted. His brows crashed together even as his eyes widened and pinched centre. “Humidity has been increased. This … this is _deliberate_.”

“It does seem so,” Ansel answered on little more than a hoarse whisper that provided him an air that was too much like his father when he was observing distasteful behaviours. “For it to fall to this condition so quickly, that’s the only determination one can make.”

“How long has Rassilon held these women?”

Ansel sniffed in with disdain and disgust, enough to crinkle up his nose. “Three days for the redhead. Two for the wife of a fallen Time Lord.”

Narvin pursed his lips into a displeased pucker and slowly nodded his head. “Are more arrivals expected?”

Ansel shook his head. “It’s my understanding that further attempts to locate any other companions have not been so fruitful.”

Narvin hummed but said nothing.

“Not that Rassilon is in any way discouraged by that.”

He hummed again.

Ansel continued to speak. “My understanding is that Rassilon believes the current incarnation of the Doctor will be more affected by these two than any that came before them, anyway.”

“And just why might that be?”

Ansel shrugged a high lift in his shoulders. His voice was flat. “Most recent ones, I suspect. Though if what my mother often said about the Doctor is in any way accurate, then there is no former companion that would be more to him than any other.”

“Except, perhaps, his wife,” Narvin muttered.

“She’d hardly be considered a _former_ companion, now, would she?”

“For a while there, Rose was just that …a _former_ associate…” He flashed a look toward Ansel and the light and strangled sound he made at that comment. “I speak from a purely technical view on that.”

Ansel’s brows lifted and his eyes widened as he shook his head slowly. “You’re a brave man for saying it, I’ll give you that.” He jabbed a finger up underneath his helmet to scratch just behind his ear. “Or not, considering you made sure he’s out of earshot when you said it…. Ehm. The Doctor, I mean.”

“Can we move back toward the two current former companions,” Narvin said with a hard sigh. “And just what physical condition they’re in right now.” His eyes narrowed as he continued to look around toward the quickly dilapidating conditions of the gaol. “Please tell me they’ve at least been given clean water and fresh food.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“The cliché we’re walking through right now suggests they aren’t,” he said with a low growl. 

“I honestly have no idea,” Ansel admitted with a shrug. “Although I’d hazard a guess they’ve been appropriately nutritionally sustained given their continued fire and passion.” He pressed his lips together in an attempt to suppress a smile. “Two and three days and already they’re legendary throughout the capitol.”

Narvin snorted out a chuckle at that, but still chose to remain quiet. It was his understanding that both of the women Rassilon’s men had decided to procure were rather feisty and therefore more than capable of protecting themselves. No doubt their heads were already together to plan a rather cunning escape…

He finally drew in a deep breath. “To the best of your knowledge, Ansel, have these two women been treated fairly…” He coughed at the look he received from the young Chancellery Guard. “Well, aside from being kidnapped from their own planet, transported here, thrown in a ….” His nose turned up as he passed a wet patch on the wall that was clearly moisture seeping in from the soil behind the brick. “In a _dungeon_.”

Ansel sniffed in deeply. “Yes. Aside from all that, Coordinator, they have been treated in much the same manner that most prisoners of the CIA are treated.”

“Minus the interrogations, I would expect.”

“Hardly.”

Narvin slowly closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “What could Rassilon possibly hope to draw from either of them? They are Human strays that the Doctor has already released…”

“And if he heard you refer to them in that manner, Coordinator…” he shook his head slowly. “You really know how to push it, don’t you?”

Narvin grunted and dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “I don’t fear him, if that’s what you’re implying. Far from it, in fact.” He drew in a breath through his nose in a hard sniff. “As for Rassilon trying to procure any form of intelligence as to the current whereabouts of the Doctor from any one of his former companions, the effort really is a waste. There is not a single one of his former companions that know the Doctor’s movements once he’s returned them back to their former lives.”

“You know where he is, though,” Ansel said quietly.

“Don’t make assumptions,” Narvin murmured low.

“I don’t need to,” he replied with a smirk. “I do speak with my parents…”

“Which means you know where he is as well.”

Ansel shook his head. “For my own safety, and for the safety of my brothers … no, we don’t. Father won’t allow it.”

“I see.”

“Anyway,” Ansel said after a short moment as they approached the door. “We’re here.” He pressed the flat of his palm against the door and held it still as he passed a look toward Narvin. “I must give you warning. They aren’t happy.”

“No, I expect they aren’t.”

“When I say they aren’t happy,” Ansel continued. “I mean they’re both quite livid about this …” He pushed open the door. “I’d recommend preparing yourself for a verbal onslaught of some of the most creative phrasing and threats you may ever have encountered.”

“Almost a millennia as Coordinator of the CIA,” Narvin said with a sigh. “I’ve faced the most disgusting, aggressive, foul-mouthed creatures in the universe. I doubt either of these two are capable of making me flinch.”

“Yeah,” he drawled with a light laugh. “We’ll see about that. The one with the red hair…” he chuckled. “She’s reduced three separate cell guards to tears.”

“I want names,” Narvin said with a growl. “Not one of them are worthy for the post,” He strode behind Ansel through the doorway and into a cell block that was darker and much damper than the corridor that had led them there. One of his brows lifted near into his hairline as he let his eyes scan the narrow hallway that surrounded what appeared to be black iron bars of the main cell…

…Odd. Bars weren’t a typical part of a Gallifreyan holding cell. Rassilon certainly was going all out in trying to reinforce _capture_ in the minds of these women, wasn’t he? 

Almost immediately upon entering the room, a shrill sound of annoyance bellowed out toward him. Narvin’s eyes flicked quickly toward the bars of the cell to fall upon a red-headed woman who was clearly incensed. Not quite ready to face such a tidal wave of litany of insult and profanity, he lifted his chin to talk toward the ceiling. “CIA Coordinator Narvinectralonum,” he announced firmly. “Deactivate security monitoring feeds, lower secondary containment fields.” He sniffed and then smirked toward Donna’s furious expression as she launched into her now well practiced rant. “Deactivate translation program.”

Ansel didn’t look at him as Narvin approached the black bars of the cell, but he did let out a light chuckle. “Well now, that’s just cheating.”

“One does what they must,” he replied with a light smirk. He walked directly toward where Donna yelled and spat from beyond the bars, then stood still with his arms folded loosely against his chest. He wore his typically neutral and unaffected expression but shifted his eyes to follow her every movement as she stalked, paced, and poked her finger angrily through the bar toward him. He remained – annoyingly – just out of reach of her.

His expression remained completely still and neutrally disinterested as Donna spat and yelled at him through the bars. He was unable to understand any part of what the woman was yelling at him, but it was crystal clear in the way the spittle sprayed outward with each and every one of her spoken syllables that not a single part of it was positive or polite at all.

He held his shoulders a little farther backward and held his hands together on his lower back. This lifted his chin toward a lightly more arrogant expression.

He could feel the presence of another two Time Lords that stood just outside of his peripheral. Their telepathic signatures suggested they had familial connection toward Ansel. His brothers: Kane and Marson, most likely.

“Your brothers?” he ventured quietly. He barely had time to wonder if he was able to be heard over the top of the shrill voice of the upset female before he heard the eldest of the Redloom children answer in the affirmative. “Are there more allies, or do we need to move quickly to secure freedom for these two women?”

“There are more,” Ansel answered carefully. “But ….” He blew out a breath. “But it’s hard to know if they can be trusted.”

“They can’t,” Narvin replied firmly. “No one can. Not now.” His eyes shifted from Donna at the bars and toward Martha toward the rear of the cell. “It’s my experience that if someone is willing to become traitor to one, they’ll become traitor to another.”

“Then you’re saying I can’t be trusted either,” Ansel said with a smirk.

“You are absolutely correct,” Narvin said with a nod of his head. “I don’t trust you; I don’t trust your brothers… I don’t trust anyone.”

“What a horrific existence you must lead,” he remarked with a shake of his head. “I pity you.”

Narvin’s expression didn’t change, but he did lift his chin lightly. “I don’t need pity. I’m very content with the life I’ve chosen to lead. Thank you.”

“I’m quite sure.” 

Narvin shifted his eyes from Martha to look back toward Donna, who still cursed and spat out her words of hostility toward him. He drew in a deep breath, swallowed, then narrowed a look toward Donna. “Does this one ever shut up?”

Martha stood from the bench of a bed toward the side of the room and looked toward Narvin with a slow blink in her eyes. In broken, yet confident Gallifreyan she answered his question. “Once she knows her voice is being heard, then yes. Donna does _shut up_.”

Narvin shifted his look toward her. He held a hand up toward Donna in a manner to signal for the woman to please find quiet. “You speak Gallifreyan,” he stated flatly. “You must be the one who married one of my people.”

“Martha,” she answered him with a somewhat arrogant tilt to her head. “My husband was Tomiwtraximery, of the Cerulean chapter.”

“Was?” he queried.

“He was killed off planet,” she clarified as she reached the bars and took position beside Donna. She put her hand on Donna’s arm and asked for quiet. She spoke to Donna with quiet, but urgent words, and waited until the redhead had calmed before looking back toward Narvin. “A Capsule accident. Though, I suspect that you already knew that.”

“I had heard something to that effect from his Lord President,” he admitted with a light pinch in between his eyes. “Although the truth of it is in question. Many reported deaths on Estrail have been, how should I say this – _exaggerated_.”

“Don’t you dare try and give me hope to that effect,” she warned him on a low voice. “I lost him once. I have grieved - _am_ grieving - that loss. I _won’t_ lose him a second time.”

“Understood,” he replied quietly. 

Martha sniffed deeply. “Are you here to help us?” she queried with light hope inside her voice.

Narvin’s eyes slid to Donna, and then back to Martha. “Why would you think that?”

Martha let he lips stretch into a small smile. “I understood you,” she said quietly. “Well, at least I understood parts of it, at least.” She shrugged and held her hands on the black bars of the cell. “I’m not fluent by any means, but I can hold my own in conversation well enough.”

His brows lifted and a tiny stretch of a smile did appear at the very corners of his mouth. “I would say that you could hold your own much better than you think – or would ever voluntarily admit to … in _different_ company.”

“You are the only one who knows I can understand your language,” she said with a straight tone in her voice. Her eyes flicked toward Ansel. “Well. And him as well.” Her eyes flicked back to Narvin. “So, who are the both of you? Did the Doctor send you?”

He drew in a deep breath before he decided that it was time to answer that question and looked toward Donna. “Before we make introductions I must ask: Is your friend quite finished caterwauling?”

Martha smiled, and even gave a light laugh at the question. Donna had been rather quiet while they’d been conversing. She looked toward the redhead with her brows seated high in question. Donna exhaled hard, but nodded in reply to the unspoken question. She looked back to Narvin with a smile and an upward tilt of one shoulder in a light shrug. “I suppose she’s worked out you can’t understand a word she’s saying.”

“No,” he agreed. “I really can’t.” He lifted his eyes upward to the ceiling. “At least not without telepathic matrices designed for translation.” He lowered his eyes to hers. “If you can guarantee me that the verbal diatribe will case from your friend, I will resolve that issue and we can discuss securing the freedom of you both.”

“Don’t ask me to speak on her behalf,” Martha answered with a smile and a tilt of her head in a gesture toward Donna. “It won’t end well for any of us.”

“No, it quite likely wont,” Narvin noted. “Thank you for not asking me to trust you.”

“I don’t trust _you_ , why should I expect you to trust me?”

He grinned at that. “You’d make a good operative for the CIA,” he suggested. He then cleared his throat and backpedalled on that. “If. If you weren’t human, of course.”

“I’ve already got a job, thank you,” she said with a one-sided smile. “An _operative_ – as you call it – for UNIT back on Earth.”

He nodded shortly. “That certainly does explain a couple of things … but leaves me with questions on others.”

“Such as how I was apprehended?”

“One of many, yes.” He lifted his head to the ceiling. “Coordinator Narvinectralonum. Enable Translation matrix.” He dropped his eyes to hers. “You can speak your native tongue now.”

“That makes it easier, thank you,” Martha said with a smile. The smile fell and she drew in a deep breath. “Narvin.”

He blinked slowly to lever her with a flat and unreadable expression. Judging by the deep and steady look of challenge in her eyes, it was clear that she expected he would be surprised that she would refer to him by name. He wasn’t going to openly display any such surprise. It was clear that her abduction was a little less involuntary as he had initially thought.

“Tell me,” he began warily. “Who are UNIT?”

Martha smirked and turned side on to him to lean her shoulder against the bars. Her turn had her facing Donna, and she assured with a wink toward her that the both of them were safe ... at least for now.

She looked back to Narvin. “United Intelligence Taskforce,” she answered with a smile. “Sort of a bit like your Celestial Intervention Agency…”

“Nothing like them, I assure you,” Narvin countered flatly. “Unless, of course, your agency is one of the three main temporal powers in the universe, defend the laws of time…”

“Travel in space and time, blah blah,” Donna cut in sharply. 

Martha let out a quiet laugh and took hold of Donna’s arm in a supportive gesture. “Narvin’s a friend,” she assured. “I’ve been expecting him. He’s going to help us out.”

“You sure he’s a friend?” Donna asked with incredulity and mirth in her tone. “This tiny little man?” She folded her arms across her chest and looked him up and down with a disappointed expression on her face. “How’s he going to get us past that gigantic idiot that put us in here in the first place?”

“Is she talking about Rassilon?” Narvin queried without showing any sign of being offended by Donna’s words. He looked to Martha. “I take it you’ve had dealing with him?”

“Is he the one who looks like he has a set of testicles on his chin?” Donna snapped, lifting her finger to just the tip of it hard into the centre of her own. “Bloody great hole to China right here?”

Narvin gaped just a little at that. “I … I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He twisted his head on his neck to look toward Martha with utter confusion in his eyes. “Testicles on his chin?” 

Martha looked down at the floor with a laugh. “I have no idea.”

“Yeah,” Donna drawled with a huff. “Rassi-something sounds about right. Arrogant. Pompous. Thinks he’s a king or something…”

Narvin flicked a look to Donna. “You’ve just described all members of council. Welcome to Gallifrey.” He slid his gaze back toward Martha. “I am curious to note that it appears as though you were told I would be coming?”

Martha nodded slowly, but with exaggerated movements. “Yes,” she answered slowly.

Narvin pressed his lips together and nodded his head. It was clear where Martha had gathered that little bit of intel. “From the Doctor, I’d expect.”

“Actually no,” Martha said without a smile. Her eyes glistened, although Narvin couldn’t tell for what reason they did so. “My friend Jack told me to expect you. Said that he’d been approached by another one of your people…”

“Ahhh,” Narvin breathed out long to interrupt. There was only one real other possibility if it wasn’t the Doctor. “Braxiatel.”

Donna gasped a little at the name. Martha swallowed and slowly nodded her head. This time, her movements much less exaggerated. “He’s the Doctor’s brother as is my understanding.” She reached down into her shirt and retrieved something small from inside her bra. She held it to Narvin, completely ignoring the somewhat horrified and discomforted look he had on his face. “I was told to give you this. Something he needs you to … upload…”

“Errr…”

She thrust it toward him through the bars. “Well? Take it.”

He looked at the small item with an expression that suggested he saw it as something that probably had eight legs and as many eyes on its head. “That’s been inside your … I really can’t…”

“You need to.”

Ansel shook his head at Narvin’s side and held up his hand to Martha. “the Coordinator can’t upload anything,” he warned. His eyes moved to Donna, and then back to Martha. “By coming here with the intentions he has, Narvin’s committed treason against our Lord President. He can’t return to the Capitol.”

Donna drew in a deep and horrified breath of her own. “And just what are these _intentions_ of yours?” She took a step back from the bars. “They better not be what I think they are, because I’m telling you, Alien-boy, you won’t get near me before I remove any ability you have of ever intending to do anything like that ever again.”

Both Ansel’s and Narvin’s faces lengthened into a gape of disgust. It was Narvin who spoke the words on the minds of both men.

“Don’t be so insulting,” he snarled. “Behaviour such as what you’re suggesting … well … well it’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just warning you,” Donna said with a sniff. “In case you were thinkin’ it.”

“My actual intention,” Narvin said with a continuing low snarl in his tone. “Was to escort you to a place of sanctuary away from the cells.” He looked to one side, toward the door, where he could see the shadows of Ansel’s brothers standing sentinel just out of view. “As I am no longer a trusted member of council … of the current administration …” He drew in a deep breath through his nose. “That sanctuary would be off planet.”

“I see,” Martha said slowly. “Will you take us to the Doctor?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid that I can’t.” his eyes flicked to Donna when she made a sound of protest. “I can’t be assured that there aren’t tracers of sorts on me or on you… That Rassilon has a way of tracing my Artron imprint, or your own human … whatever imprint you may have to identify and trace you. Therefore….”

“Therefore, you have to take us as far from him as you can,” Martha completed for him with a nod of her head and a deep inhale of breath. “Being that this Rassilon person is looking for him.”

“He’s looking for the Doctor’s wife,” Narvin corrected. “But yes, the Doctor and Braxiatel would do just fine as well…”

“Because Rose would give herself up for the both of them,” Donna said with a low tone of voice. She looked at Martha. “I know Irving. God, I lived next door to him and Rose for more than three years.” She shifted her eyes to Narvin. “She loves that man with everything inside her – as much as she does the Doctor. If this Rassi-man got hold of him or the Doctor, she’d hand herself to him without a second thought.” 

Ansel sniffed hard. “We can’t let that happen.” He gestured to a number pad on the doorway. “And we can’t let the Doctor know that he has former companions locked up here. He finds out, he’ll materialise in a heartsbeat. Rassilon’s waiting for the TARDIS to show up … The Doctor won’t stand a chance.”

“I know,” Narvin agreed on a low voice. “The last thing this planet needs is Braxiatel on a rampage because his brother’s in trouble, then for Rose to follow for the same reason.” He shook his head and lifted a hand. Using his thumb, he keyed in a numerical code to open the cage. Almost immediately, alarms began to blare loudly from above. “Oh by the Gods….”

Ansel kicked at the ground. He let out a swear shoved Narvin by the shoulder toward the two women. “You need to get out of here,” he warned sharply. “Chancellery Guard will be here within a heartsbeat. Get them free, Kane, Marson and I will run what interference we can…”

“And get killed in the process,” Narvin countered with a growl and a shake in his head. “No. I won’t allow that. I won’t allow Leela to know it was even an _option_ for me to allow that…” He rubbed his brows. “She’d kill me…. Several times over…”

“Mother will understand,” Ansel assured him. He held out his hand to Martha. “Give me the chip, I’ll make sure it gets uploaded as per the Cardinal’s wish.” With his hand held up, he gave Narvin a shove with the other. “Now hurry up. You all need to get out of here.”

“Not before I’ve done this,” Narvin said with a growl as he snatched Ansel’s staser from his holster. He aimed the weapon at the young man’s chest. “Can you regenerate?”

Ansel’s eyes blew wide. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Can you regenerate?” he growled with more urgency in his tone. “The only way to save you three is for me to shoot you and make it look like I’d escaped.”

“What?”

“I’m going to shoot you,” he repeated harshly. “Through your left heart. So tell me: Can you regenerate?”

“Yes,” he snapped, his eyes wide with fear, but purpose. “So, shoot me, Narvin. Do it!”

“Leela forgive me,” he pleaded quietly. “I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes and pulled the trigger, immediately dropping Ansel to the ground. He let the staser fall from his fingers to strike the ground with a loud clatter that was only slightly louder than the cry of horror from Donna.

Narvin crouched and petted Ansel on the chest as the young man writhed and hissed through his teeth. “I am very sorry,” he assured him.

“I know,” Ansel hissed through his teeth as he nodded. “Now you all need to get out of here. Please. Don’t make my regeneration be for nothing…”

“Thank you,” Narvin said with a nod as he drew to a stand. He lifted his sleeve and pulled two golden bands from his wrist. He held one in each hand and stretched his arms outward to Donna and Martha. “We have to leave.”

“You shot him!” Donna said with horror in her tone. She looked from Ansel to Narvin. “How can I trust you?”

“You really can’t,” he answered flatly. “But you don’t have much choice. It’s either you come with me, or you stay here and face Rassilon…”

“And risk the Doctor,” Martha added. She took the bangle from Narvin and slipped it over her hand. She lifted her eyes to Narvin’s as she pulled the ring up her arm. “But we go where I want to go,” she warned him low. “To where I know both Donna and I are going to be safe.”

“Sounds fair,” Narvin agreed with a nod. “And where might that be?”

“Torchwood,” she said with an almost arrogant lift of her chin. “To Jack.” She swallowed thickly. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

“You say that like you have a choice,” Narvin said flatly. He then drew in a breath and nodded as the acrid smell of Lindos from behind him announced an imminent regeneration. “Best we be off then. To … where was it?”

“Torchwood,” Martha clarified. “Cardiff, in Wales.”

Narvin nodded. “I am familiar with the location.” He drew in a breath. “There’s a time rift there that my office has been monitoring.” He moved toward Donna and slipped the bangle over her wrist. He quickly programmed the device with the appropriate coordinates, then stepped back. He gave a half smile and held his wrist inside his hand, his thumb over the activation switch of the time ring. “Just a tap. Both of you. And we’ll be on our way.” He looked back to Ansel, who was aglow with regeneration. He could hear the scuffle of feet and the clanking of armour down inside the hallway.

They were out of time.

“To Cardiff, then. On one,” he said firmly. “Three. Two. And one…”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	75. Procrastinating

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Lads of Lungbarrow prepare to leave for Gallifrey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I could get a single moment of time to myself.. It's been hard to find a spare moment to write. While this might take me a half day to write on a normal day, this chapter took more than a week of twenty minute blocks...
> 
> Anyway. I do hope that you enjoy this chapter. I really do.
> 
> Thanks for all of your comments. I am reading and loving hearing from you, but AO3 and my iphone don't tend to agree much, and I get all sorts of error messages and funky stuff happening when I try to reply. I will keep trying!
> 
> Thanks again. :)

~~oooOOOooo~~

She stood like a beacon in the sunlight over a small rise in the ground that overlooked the bustling and busy encampment below. There was a shift of her long dark hair in the wind, and the movement of her knee-length white tunic around a posture so stoic and unmoving that she may well have been a statue of guard over the people.

…And in some degree, she was. A life committed to the safety and preservation of time and of Gallifrey’s children. An unknown, and unchampioned figure of protection to them all. Her lives at risk each day to protect the laws of time and the laws of Gallifrey.

If she’d been anyone else, Braxiatel may have found the image of her unsmiling expression of fierce protection over the entire camp in some way magnificent. He might even deify her somewhat; commission busts and statues to stand as sentinel over all them all…

…If she was anyone else…

As it was, the woman that stoically overlooked the encampment with an expression of analysis in her eyes that could easily be misidentified as judgmental did stand as sentinel. She was as fiercely protective over them as any other member of what Rose had recently begun to call the Galligang…

…Terrible moniker, indeed.

Now, Braxiatel would be the first one to disparage Narvinectralonum on any day and in any setting. Today however, with the fierceness of her gaze and posture focused firmly on the movements of the settlement bustling almost at her feet, he couldn’t help but spare a moment of respect toward her. 

A small moment. Rather short. Tiny, really.

“Narvin certainly does strike a fine pose when she thinks no one is watching, doesn’t she?” Romana quipped with a smile at Braxiatel’s side.

Narvin let out a light snort. “Don’t think I can’t tell when I am being observed,” she replied without taking her eyes from the people milling a short distance away. “I knew Brax was watching me. I was merely ignoring him.”

At the sound of his wife’s voice at his side, and of Narvin’s admission, and Braxiatel blinked out of the focus he had on his old friend in the near distance. He cleared his throat with mild discomfort and hid his embarrassment with a grunt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he replied coolly. “I was not _watching_.”

Narvin still didn’t take her eyes from the movement ahead of her. “Then what else is one doing when they stand in silent contemplation with their focus on another individual?” She blinked and hummed a questioning sound as a sly smile slowly curled the very edges of her lips upward and she slid her eyes to him.

“That is a long and varied list of options,” Braxiatel answered with a derisive sniff. “Really, Narvin. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“I consider it more along the lines of insult and disgust,” she answered with a light lift of a shrug in her shoulder. “Hardly _flattering_.”

“Ouch,” Braxiatel drolled in a slow and flat tone with a roll in his eyes.

Romana looked between Narvin and Braxiatel with a small smile on her mouth. “Can I rely on you to get whatever this is…” she gestured between them. “… out of your system before the pair of you leave?”

“There is nothing to get out of our system,” Narvin said with light amusement. “Just light banter.”

“Indeed,” Braxiatel agreed quietly. He drew in a deep breath that pulled back his shoulders and puffed up his chest. He held that breath as he let his eyes take in the image that Narvin had been so intently observing only moments ago. “Just light banter.”

“Good,” Romana said with a firm nod of her head. “Because I would hate for any one of you to have any form of distraction at all. You are heading to Gallifrey, after all, and it is not a hospitable place for any one of us right now.”

“Dangerous,” Narvin added darkly.

“Truer, and more devastating words have never before been spoken,” Braxiatel admitted along a slow exhale. There was a definite measure of hurt in his voice as he spoke that realisation out loud. “How is it that what was once our sanctuary, _our home_ , has now become the exact opposite: an inhospitable hell?”

“A dictator in power,” Narvin said with disgust in her tone. “A megalomaniac who would destroy Gallifrey to ascend as a God over the universe.”

Braxiatel exhaled and dropped his chin to his chest with clear disappointment. “How did it come to this?”

“Because we allowed it,” Narvin answered with a sneer. “Because too many were too coward to put a stop to the madness.”

“And that attitude has changed,” Romana vowed gently. “The sons and daughters of time will rise against him. Will rise against all of it.”

“With what army?” Narvin breathed out quietly. 

“I’m sorry?”

Narvin turned her face toward Romana. There was a look of challenge in her eyes, an expression that charged the former President of Gallifrey to take stock of what she had, and work to secure what she didn’t. “For all the detractors that he has, Rassilon does have a formidable army behind him. What stands behind _you_ , Madam President?”

Braxiatel’s expression hardened and his jaw fell to make exclamation to Narvin’s challenge. He closed his jaw tight when Narvin raised her hand to tell him that no answer was necessary.

“You have work to do,” she warned. “And a lot of it in a very short amount of time. Because this is all about to come to a somewhat abrupt – and rather devastating - climax.”

Romana swallowed hard. “I know. I can feel it.”

“Lives will be changed forever.”

Romana nodded slowly. Her face contorted into a pained wince of foreboding. “And my … I mean … _our_ people?” She sniffed and lifted her chin to look down her cheek at the future version of one of her oldest friends. She saw the minute shift in her head that was a shake of warning not to press to hard on the subject. “Tell me, Narvin…”

“You know that I can’t,” she answered flatly. 

“You can,” she argued. “And you will.”

Narvin let out a light laugh through her nose. There was a shake in her head. “I can’t risk the potential of you trying to change …”

“I think you being here has changed things, don’t you?” Romana interrupted harshly.

“I _intervene_ ,” Narvin reminded her with a slow blink that hardened the expression in her eyes. “I don’t make _changes_. Nothing about me being here now has altered a single part of the original timeline I’m from.” She lifted her head with rivalled arrogance to Romana’s. “And I assure you that if I get even a slight sense of a potential change to the timelines, I _will_ intervene and put a stop to it regardless of who stands in my way.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t arrived here in the first place, such interventions wouldn’t be warranted,” Romana argued without raising her voice or hardening her tone. “Because if you hadn’t, then we would not be aware of what the future timeline held for us.”

Narvin snorted and let her eyes drift toward Braxiatel. “If anyone else was involved in this, Romana, then I wouldn’t need to. However…” she looked back to Romana. “When one walks a path he’s already seen the future of ….” She inhaled hard through her nose. “Then intervention does become quite necessary to maintain Time’s originally intended path.”

Romana cleared her throat, then swallowed over a lump. She understood exactly what Narvin was alluding to. “He wouldn’t,” she argued under her breath.

“He already has,” Narvin corrected firmly. “And for that matter, Romana, so have you.” She looked between the both of them. “If you hadn’t, then it wouldn’t have had to have been _me_ who started the Time War. Would it?”

“So, this is all your fault then,” Braxiatel said with a light growl in his voice. Despite the growl, he did make the charge with a light smile tickling the edges of his lips. It was as playful as it was accusatory. “The War, and the associated heartsaches…”

“That was a future of me from an aborted timeline,” Romana stated, lifting her finger in warning toward Braxiatel. “That timeline doesn’t exist anymore.”

“But it _did_ exist,” Narvin replied smoothly. “Until you sent Braxiatel back to change that future.”

“Which I obviously did because it was for the best for Gallifrey to do so,” she countered with a light pinch in between her eyes. 

“For Gallifrey?” Narvin queried with mild challenge in her voice. “Or for you?”

Romana looked up and drew her eyes upward with a petulant lift in her chin. “My highest priority is – and always has been – Gallifrey.”

“Has it?”

“There shouldn’t be any question on that front,” she snapped in reply. 

Narvin pursed her lips and nodded slowly, the glint in her eye warning that she was formulating a rebuttal to that that just might sting a little. She rubbed at her jaw with her thumb and index finger cupping her chin, then lifted one side of her lip into a smile.

“Well, I do seem to recall that…”

“Well, I see nothing changes among council members,” The Doctor’s voice chirped in with humour that was slightly forced. “What ifs, what once was, and what could’ve been … Typical argumentative banter of the Time Lords.” He was still adjusting his tie as he joined the group. “Whataboutisms abound…”

Braxiatel raised a brow at his brother. “I think you’re mistaking the definition of a whataboutism, Thete. At least those of the standard I expect you refer – namely: Earth.”

“I really don’t think I am,” he countered with a light wrinkle in his nose at the knot of his tie not being quite wiling to cater to his demand of centering at his throat. “And it means the same thing everywhere, Brax. Particularly o Gallifrey. It’s quite a universal thing, really.”

Romana let out a light huff and stepped up to the pinstriped man and fixed the knot of his tie for him. Braxiatel watched his wife with a light lift in his brow. His eyes remained on her hands, and not on his brother as he spoke. “Hardly.”

The Doctor smiled as though challenged and looked around Romana’s ear toward Braxiatel. His voice practically sang out. “The quoque logical fallacy is the very cornerstone of Time Lord arguments on any given day, and I dare you to disagree with me.”

“Well that may be true in ordinary circumstances,” Braxiatel scoffed with a huff and a roll in his eyes. “However, in this case…”

“No,” Narvin cut in with a nod if her head and a lift of her finger. “The Doctor is correct. That’s very much where I was headed.”

Braxiatel’s eyes rolled upward so dramatically that there was no visible colour at all. “Yes. Of course.” He could hear his brother’s pleased little smirk even without dropping his gaze to look at him. Instead he drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes as his head lowered to a more comfortable position. “Are we ready, then?”

The Doctor offered quiet thanks to Romana as she patted his chest and stepped away from him, then looked toward his brother with his expression falling from amusement to worry. “Eager to be off?”

Braxiatel’s eyes opened slowly and he rewarded his brother’s question with a tired expression. “The sooner we leave, the sooner we can return, Thete. I don’t really like the idea of heading to Gallifrey right now…”

“Then why are we?” He looked toward Romana with a lift in his brows and a pinch in his eyes. “Is K-9 really that important to you?”

“It was your brother’s suggestion,” Romana answered quietly. She swallowed and ifted her head to look at Braxiatel with an expression of loyalty and support. “And I happen to agree that it would be most beneficial to us to have K-9 here, with us, to assist in better understanding what we will face when we do end up going against Rassilon.”

The Doctor tilted his head to one side and scratched at his sideburn. There was a contortion of argument in the line of his lips, but that argument went unspoken. Instead he looked between Braxiatel and Narvin with wide eyes of question. “Right. So.” He swallowed and then cleared his throat. “Rose and the kids are free of the TARDIS, we can leave as soon as the both of you are ready.”

“I must protest against the use of your TARDIS,” Narvin breathed out with a deep inhale to finish. She kept her hands cradled together underneath her tabard rather than gesture toward the old machine as she wanted to. “It’s not quite as stealthy as this operation requires us to be.”

“My TARDIS is more than adequate for the task, thank you,” the Doctor answered with a petulant sniff and an expression of disdain. “When she wants to fly silent, she is more than capable.”

“Yes, well,” She drawled. “That may well be the case, but are you at all capable of flying her in that manner?”

He flicked up a finger. “Perfectly capable, thank you. And despite the ridiculous notion being disseminated by persons unknown, I am not leaving the parking brake on during flight. The whine and wheeze of the ship in flight…”

“Is the sound of the Relative Dimensional Stabilizer in materialisation or dematerialisation mode,” Braxiatel stated with his own expression of annoyed confusion toward the matter. “Yes. I have heard that mentioned as well. Terrible rumour, very inaccurate. Just what is being taught at the academy these days?”

“Right now: nothing,” Narvin said with a shake in her head. “For at least a few centuries now. Perhaps, when you are both finished with your procrastination efforts – or perhaps even as part of such – you might want to create the capsule flight and maintenance curriculum for the next wave of Cadets that will show up on Gallifrey’s doorstep looking for education much better suited for actual children of time….” Her eyes shifted toward Romana.

Romana halted her words with a fast upward snap of her hand. “Now is not the time, Narvin.” She exhaled a breath and took a long stride toward her husband. She swallowed as she curled her hand around Braxiatel’s arm to draw herself closer to him. She nestled her head against his shoulder. “Return to me, Irving.”

“In a Gallifrey minute,” he assured her with a smile of affection as he drew his thumb lightly along her cheek. He dipped his head to kiss her mouth lightly.

“I will hold you to that,” she warned against his kiss. “No longer than that minute, do you hear me?”

“Clearly, my Lady.” He dipped his head lightly in a respectful gesture and loosened her from around his arm. “Now if you wouldn’t mind. We best be off.” He stepped away from his wife and walked quickly toward the TARDIS; leaving the Doctor and Narvin behind in his wake. It wasn’t until he got to the open door of the old time ship that he finally turned around. His expression was one of impatience as he gestured toward the doors. “Well? Are you both coming, or not?”

The Doctor skipped in place, his eyes shot wide and he nodded quickly. “Yep. Ehm. On my way.” He flicked his attention toward Narvin, who stood still with a light slump in her shoulders. “Shall we?”

“If we must,” she answered with a sigh. She didn’t bother checking further if the Doctor was going to follow. She flicked her hands underneath her tabard, then let them fall to her sides as she strode quickly forward. She didn’t look back at the Doctor, but it was clear that she could see he hadn’t moved. “Well, come on, Lord Sigma. You and your brother can’t very well get yourselves into trouble at the Capitol with Rassilon if you don’t actually show up there, can you?”

The Doctor’s jaw dropped and his eyes widened further. He quickly jogged forward to catch up with her. “What did you just say?”

She shrugged and deliberately kept her eyes off him. “The truth, a lie, a potential outcome….” She shrugged her right shoulder up high enough to touch her ear. “Just words really.”

Braxiatel narrowed his eyes at her when Narvin curled around him to walk through the door. “Not when they come from you, I’m afraid.” He exhaled hard at the cheekily cryptic smile she offered in response. “I can already tell this isn’t going to go quite as well as I was hoping it might.”

The Doctor walked by him. “Welcome to _my_ life. Are you quite sure you want your little brother tagging along?”

“Not entirely.” He swallowed and looked back toward Romana. He pressed his hand in between his hearts and slowly dipped forward in a light bow. “My hearts beat for you,” he recited affectionately despite the fact she was too far away to hear the sentiment. She did, however, return the gesture with her hand curled in between her breasts. He stepped into the TARDIS and closed the doors behind him.

“We ready?” the Doctor questioned from the console. The light shortness of his breath suggested that he’d been quickly moving around the centre column. He stood with his hand positioned palm-upward on a lever he looked to want to push upward with the length of his fingers.

Braxiatel pulled off the door and stalked toward the centre of the TARDIS. “Let’s go. And if you don’t mind, Thete… Can you ask the old girl for a little bit of stealth in her flight.”

“Say it like that,” he drawled long. “And she’d scream a little louder just to defy you.”

“Not if it would come at risk to her pilot.” He looked up the entire length of the rotor column with an expression of warning. “Discovery might well mean his extermination, dear. Do keep that in mind if you feel the need to deliberately deny my request for silent flight.” He smiled when the whine and wheeze dulled down to almost complete silence. “Thank you.”

“You’d better thank her,” the Doctor drawled as he danced around the ship to flick switches and pull levers. “It does take effort and concentration for her to silence the stabilisers like that.”

He stopped his dance shortly before he could collide with Narvin and offered her a look that asked her to move so that he could continue to pilot. Rather than move out of his way, she lifted a hand and twisted the dial that was immediately ahead of her. “Might I recommend an upgrade, Lord Sigma. This cobbled-together look of hers is quite ….” She drew in a deep breath. “It’s quite heartsbreaking to see on an otherwise magnificent ship.”

“She is perfectly fine, thank you,” the Doctor replied inside a happy quip. He lifted onto his toes and petted the rotor column. “Isn’t that right, old girl? You’re very happy inside this look, aren’t you?”

“I hardly think so.”

He pointed a finger at her. “Well, you just don’t know her at all, do you. So be quiet.” He looked down at the console and then toward Braxiatel with a light spark of warning in his eye. “Materialisation in less than a minute. Not too late to back out, you know.”

“Since when have you known me to back out of anything, Thete?”

His eyes widened and he looked down at the console with a light dance in the shift of his head. He kept his voice quiet. “Maybe we’d all find ourselves in less trouble if you did.”

“Oh, like you can talk,” Braxiatel snapped out. “Really.”

The Doctor chuckled lightly. He then drew in a hard breath. “Heads up. We’ve materialised.”

“Great,” Braxiatel drawled. “In the old Academy ruins, Thete?”

“Uh,” he squeaked. “Where?”

Narvin levered him with a wide-eyed look. “The Academy ruins. Just outside the capital boundary. As we discussed…”

“Yeah, I remember. I am quite sure that’s where I told the old girl we needed to land,” he drawled out as he double-checked the coordinates that he’d entered into the navigation system. Indeed, he had input coordinates appropriate for materialisation at the ruins. His own internal sense of time and location warned him that it wasn’t quite where the ship had taken them.

“Then we should be safe to exit,” Braxiatel stated confidently. “I have been assured by Leela and by Andred that the ruins are the safest location, free of guards.

“Yeah,” the Doctor drawled. There was a pained expression on his face. “However, it seems that we may have landed just a little bit … ehm … East of the Academy.”

“East?”

“Or North,” he ventured with a slight squeak in his voice. “Or South. It’s really been a long time since I’ve wandered the hallways of the academy. I don’t quite recall just what direction the Capitol is from there.”

“South-West from the Prydon Academy,” Narvin said on a low tone of voice.

“Okay, then it appears we’ve landed at a location a little south-west of our preferred location.”

Braxiatel grit his teeth and pressed one hand against one of the coral struts. There was a bow in his head. “We should have taken my capsule….”

“Should’ve, could’ve, would’ve, but we didn’t,” the Doctor said with a huff. There was annoyance in his own tone, which both Narvin and Braxiatel could tell was directed at the ship and her legendary defiance against the navigational demands of her pilot. “Means we have to work with what we’ve got, right?”

“Where are we?” Braxiatel queried.

“CIA,” the Doctor answered with a look toward Narvin. “Her office. Well, her younger self’s office, anyway.”

Braxiatel didn’t seem too bothered by that. “I see. I suppose there are worse places to end up.”

Narvin shook her head as she walked past him toward the doors. “You might think so, Brax.” She drew in a deep breath and closed her eyes as she curled her hand around the handle to pull the door open. “However…. Not quite in this case.”

The Doctor walked around the console and made his way up the ramp to meet her. He felt Braxiatel’s presence as he moved in to walk behind him. “What do you mean by that?” he questioned worriedly.

Narvin looked down her shoulder toward him. There was an expression that may have been apology in her eye. 

“What did you do?” Braxiatel accused with a harsh sound in his tone. He wove himself around his brother to stand at Narvin’s shoulder. His face was dark and full of accusation. “What have you done?”

“What needed to be done,” she answered as she pulled open the door. Outside the TARDIS was a swath of men and women dressed in the white robe and black tabard ensemble worn only by members of the Celestial Intervention Agency – many of them holding firearms at aim. “What members of the CIA are sworn to do.” 

Braxiatel snapped a look at her and let out a growl. “What’s that: Deceit and betrayal?”

She levered him a furious expression to his charge. “Betrayal is what _you_ do, Brax. Me? I _intervene_ …”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	76. Cardiff

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narvin gets Martha and Donna to safety

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 104 days ago I quit smoking. 104 Days ago, I lost all will and interest in doing anything I loved to do -- writing being the #1 victim to that.
> 
> However, now I seem to have found my will again. I am quite rusty, so do forgive the static.
> 
> I hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

Low winds carried a dry leaf across damp cement. The leaf twisted and turned in the breeze, rising up and then falling into the current that raced across the pathway. A hum accompanied the current, inhaling and exhaling to finally draw out as little more than an audible vibration as three bodies slowly materialised into their new reality. Unlike the pulsing in and out materialisation of a Time Lord travel capsule, the three bodies shifted into this world with a steady shift from transparency to opacity.

There was no stumble or sway in any member of the trio. There was no unsteady walk or swagger. They simply appeared, still inside the same posture and expression as they were on the other side of their departure location.

Martha was the first one to break position, and she did so by stretching a wide smile across her face. She then opened her arms and looked downward as if analysing herself for any injury.

“Well,” she drawled humourously without looking up. “Much better than the last time I had to do this.”

“You’ve done this before?” Narvin queried with a condescending surprise. His eyes shifted upward into his frown in thought. “I always thought the Doctor only ever travelled by TARDIS.”

“Except when it gets stolen…” she replied with a smirk. “…and our only way to get it back is to travel by Vortex Manipulator.”

A look of distaste crossed his features. He slapped his tongue on the roof of his mouth with deliberate intent to issue the most undeniable look of displeasure across the entire multiverse. “And just where did the Doctor manage to procure such an outdated, cheap, and rustic manner of travel?”

Martha was clearly amused as her lips stretched into a wide smile. Her eyes pinched just lightly to carry the smile clear up into her eyes, and she tipped her head to indicate a spot behind them. “From the wrist of the man who we’re about to go see.”

Narvin kept his voice low in both timbre and volume. “And just who might that be?”

“Jack.”

Narvin hummed. “Yes, you did mention that back in the cells on Gallifrey. However, would you care to elaborate just a little more toward the identity of this individual.” He lifted his eyes to hers, taking care to tilt his head in such a way that he looked at her through his brows. “So that I may better determine just how it is he possesses time travel technology.”

“Why?” she queried with a one sided smirk. “So that you can decide he’s not worthy of owning that kind of technology?”

Narvin merely snorted at the charge.

“Captain Jack Harness,” Martha provided with a breathy voice and smile. “He’s a time traveller, like your lot.”

Narvin’s brow flicked upward in an attempt to covey mild annoyance rather than show the small bit of worry that was creeping into his subconscious. “A Time Lord?”

“No.”

“Nekkistani?”

Martha blinked. Her amusement was fading, but her smile remained – if only across her cheeks. “I’m sorry. Who? Pakistani?”

“Not Nekkistani then,” Narvin deduced. He puckered his lips with thought. “Monan? Sunari? Phaidonian, perhaps?”

Martha slowly shook her head. “Ah, no. None of the above. Jack: he’s human.”

Narvin’s eyes narrowed just slightly. “Humans aren’t technologically advanced enough to have mastered time travel,” he offered quite flatly with a look down to the golden ring curled around his wrist. “Not enough for a vortex manipulator at any rate.” His voice fell to a whisper. “But if it is the case, and there does exists a Vortex Manipulator in _this_ place and time, then it does need to be removed from the time stream before one of your kind gets their hands on it and does something stupid that completely derails all of reality as we know it…”

He heard the charge of “who made you boss” muttered disdainfully from his rear, where Donna was in silent, angry watch of him and shifted his ear toward the growl. He looked down along his shoulder in an attempt to look at where she stood behind him. “It was granted to me by Lady Romanadvoratrelundar,” he answered plainly. “Lady President of Gallifrey, the leading temporal power in the universe.”

The nausea that had held her silently in place had finally lifted. Donna wasn’t ready to continue her silence now that she was able to find her voice again and not vomit with the effort. “Yeah, well this isn’t _Gallifrey_ , is it?” She strode forward in a front-leaning stalk of anger. She could feel his eyes on her and see the shift of his head as she walked around to his front but didn’t let it sway her at all. She took position directly in front of him and straightened her back enough that she had nearly an inch of height over him and looked down along the bridge of her nose into his face. “This is _Earth_.”

Narvin blinked slowly. He was never one to show any form of inferiority or fear toward another. Being one of the shorter statured members of the time Lord Society, he had to maintain a level of arrogance and disdain that could elevate him to stand a good metaphoric foot over the head of another. His slow blink and his deep inhale then shifted to an almost relaxed stance; one that was close to flippant underneath her glare. “Is _that_ where we are?” he queried facetiously. “Well aren’t I so thankful for you telling me that, as I would never have guessed at all that that was where we ended up.” 

Narvin didn’t see the tightening in her eyes and the set of her jaw in response to his clear condescension, but he felt that glare tightening at him. “I can certainly see just why the Lord Doctor took you along for his journeys…” He lowered and then shook his head. He stepped to one side with the intention to step around her. “Now if you will excuse me, I do need to ensure that the both of you are safe and secure before I return to Gallifrey…”

He held back on finishing that thought, but only because of the loud huff she made in reply. His mind counted down the seconds it would take for her to change that huff into words of argument. He wasn’t entirely sure if he was surprised in a good or shocked way that his countdown to vocal explosion yielded nothing of that nature. Instead, Donna’s huff switched into a long sigh that shifted gears halfway through to move from annoyed to concerned.

“What, really, is going on?” she asked almost defeatedly, a complete contradiction from the woman he’d initially met in the cell. “And how much danger is the Doctor _really_ in?”

Narvin tipped up his right shoulder into a shrug. “Lots,” he answered simply. “More than he’s ever been in, if I’m going to be honest.” He then looked to Martha. “In order to move quickly so that I can return to Braxiatel and Romana, do tell me how we can find this friend of yours in the most expedited manner possible. Do you need to call him to arrange for pickup?”

A low masculine chuckle danced across his shoulders from behind him. 

“I’d pick _you_ up _any_ time.”

Narvin could feel the waggle of brows that accommodated the husky response. The hair on the back of his neck stiffened in response. He tightened the seat of his shoulders and straightened his back to ramrod-straight. “Captain Jack, I presume,” he breathed out flatly.

Jack hummed in a manner both leering and appreciative. “The one and only,” he purred out long. He stepped out of the shadows behind Narvin and propped his large weapon up on his shoulder as he walked around him to move toward Martha. He kept his eyes on Narvin and stretched a cheeky one-sided smirk wide across his face. “And just _who_ do we have here, then?”

Narvin blinked but didn’t immediately reply. Instead he shifted his eyes toward Martha. He noted the way she beamed toward the man, and how the worry-taut hold of her shoulders fell with relief. He nodded slowly. “I am going to assume that you’re both safe then?”

“As safe as one can be with Time Lords going after them,” Martha replied with a shrug and a deep inhale.

“I wouldn’t worry about them making further attempts against you,” he offered with a lift in his chin. “Rassilon knows I was the one to get you out of there…”

“You say that like he fears you,” Martha noted with her brows in an upward arch.

Narvin actually smiled toward the suggestion. “Hardly,” he admitted with a huff in his voice. He drew in a breath and smiled a humourless expression. “I am a Lord of time without regenerations at my disposal. He knows this. Even if I was so inclined to take arms against his Lord Rassilon, right now I am as delicate as a human with far too much to lose to become anyone who may pose any kind of threat toward him.” He shook his head. “He’d much sooner assume that I’ve returned you to the Doctor.” 

“Which I gather is what he expected you to do,” Jack offered in a low tone. “…return the ladies to the Doctor.”

He nodded and then looked upward into the sky and drew in a deep breath. “Indeed. And speaking of. My being here may well put you all in danger…”

“I thought you said no more attempts,” Donna corrected worriedly. 

“Against _you_ ,” he clarified. “ _Me_ , on the other hand….” He exhaled hard. “I just committed treason against my President … a rather _expected_ treasonous act at that.”

“Are you thinking you’ve been traced?” Jack queried in a tone of voice that spoke more factually than asking a question.

Narvin shifted his eyes toward Jack. “I _know_ I’ve been tracked, Captain,” he replied flatly. “There is no question of it.”

Jack stuck the tip of his tongue in the corner of his mouth and lifted his eyes to look upward. There was a shadow of a smile across the cleanly shaven corners of his mouth. “I’d really like to see him try.”

On a normal day, the light hint of victory and smugness inside Jack’s tone would have irritated Narvin to the point of wanting to use his staser on him. But this was no ordinary day, and Narvin’s staser was close to being out of charge. Not wanting to discharge the weapon unnecessarily, he merely inhaled a deep breath and held back his shoulders with arrogance just a little bit taller than where Jack’s was at present.

“Braxiatel provided you with means to evade any such tracers, I am guessing?”

Jack’s brows lifted. The hidden shadow of a smirk shifted toward a more visible stretch of his lips. “He provided me with many, _many_ , things …” Jack husked out suggestively. The husky voice shuddered out with a shake of his head, and in an instant the cheek was gone. “Unfortunately, a jamming system capable of blocking Gallifreyan scanning technologies was not one of them.”

“Surprising,” Narvin noted quietly. “That does seem like something he’d have given you. Rather unusual that he wouldn’t have planned for this.”

“Oh, he did,” Jack sang with a smile and a shake of his head. “Don’t think for a second that the old boy didn’t have a plan in place.” He turned to one side and flicked his hand over his shoulder in a gesture of invitation for them to follow him. “Which is why he planned for you to arrive here, and not where I’d typically prefer to meet.”

“Where have we materialised?” Narvin queried curiously. He let his eyes shift to look around him. “And why was this location specifically chosen by Lord Braxiatel. It hardly seems like a remarkable location.”

“More remarkable than you think,” he answered with a shrug.

Narvin’s eyes slid shut with annoyance. Half information and running around the questions irritated him no end. He rolled his head on his neck and counted quietly under his breath. “The both of them and their ability to befriend the most annoying creatures. Cut from the same cloth…”

“Is he really the Doctor’s brother?” Jack asked with genuine disbelief.

“Why it is that I am expected to answer your questions when you refuse to answer mine is curious,” Narvin groused in reply. With a huff, though, he answered. “Yes. Born of the same loom with the same genetic donors.”

“The Doctor has a brother. A real, legit, brother,” Jack murmured low in reply. He shook his head. “Hard for me to believe it. I don’t know why, but it is…”

“Difficult reality for him to come to terms with as well, I assure you of that,” Narvin cut back. 

“For which one of them?”

“Take your pick,” he said with a huff. He then stopped following behind Jack and set his hands on his hips with frustration. “Now if you could please answer my questions, I’d appreciate it. I am a rather busy man, and don’t have time to continue to babysit Humans. I risked everything to get these two ladies back to Earth, and I’d appreciate knowing that they’re both safe.”

Jack continued walking, despite the distance between he and Narvin stretching out. “Welcome to Cardiff,” he called over his shoulder with a dramatic lift in his arms and a spin in his step. “Gateway to Time and space with one of the biggest rifts in the universe off Gallifrey.”

“Which is important for just what reason?”

Jack stopped walking and turned to look at him. One brow arched high, the other seated itself low over his eye. “I thought you were CIA.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You’re dressed in the penguin robe and tabard set of the Celestial Intervention Agency,” he began with a snort. “Combine that with the uptightedness and sealed sphincter that your type are renowned for, and it doesn’t take a genius to work it out….”

“No, just someone who is crass and uncultured.”

“And I resemble both,” Jack replied with a smirk. “Just two of my many delightful, shiny, fabulous facets.”

“Indeed, the requisite attributes to become acquainted with the Doctor.” Narvin drew in a breath and exhaled it in a long suffering manner. He kept his voice low. “I need to make sure that both of these ladies are in a safe place. Can you _please_ confirm to me that with you they are? Assure me that my sacrifice will not be in vain so that I may go back on my way and can return to where it is that I am truly needed … “ He drew in a breath. “… by _my_ people.” His voice fell to a whisper. “Hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Jack returned his question, and the tired delivery of it with a firm nod of his head. “Safer than anywhere else on Earth, you can be sure of it.”

“Yes,” he drawled long. “I am quite sure that you feel yourself fortified enough to believe that, but I don’t. So do humour me and advise on exactly _how_ it is that you think you are capable of evading technologies far superior to anything you have on this planet at this place in time.”

Jack paused for just a moment to analyse the set of Narvin’s features. While definitely arrogant, with the smug attitude that comes from considering oneself superior to all others, Jack could see the slight waver in expression; a shift that belied the smug arrogance somewhat and indicated genuine caring toward another. Any smartarse retort that was making its way up into his throat was swallowed back down. He offered a weak smile instead and gestured around him with an opening of his arms in display of the plass that surrounded them. “This is a neutral zone,” he offered in a friendly tone. He waited until Narvin’s eyes had lifted to meet his to continue. “By that I mean it’s a blind zone in regard to temporal tracers. The energy produced by the rift in this area is blinding to the more advanced methods of scanning, without making the blind spot obvious to those sending out a virtual search party.”

The light curious pinch inside Narvin’s eye relaxed and the Time Lord nodded slowly. “I have heard of such phenomenon. And have even researched potential counters to it.” He sniffed. “ _Theoretically_ , of course.” He smirked just slightly. “No more than a few equations here and there.”

“Officially,” Jack added blandly, although he wore a smirk of his own.

“Officially,” he confirmed.

“So, _theoretically_ , can it be countered?” He looked around him with light concern marring his features.

Narvin shrugged just lightly. “Theoretically, yes. But those same theories do have theoretical counters of their own.”

Donna let out a long huff. “God, listen to the two of you. Theory this and theory that, all to avoid sayin’ ‘yeah, I bested the universe and solved the problem’.” She shook her head slowly. “Men. Doesn’t matter which planet they’re from….”

Narvin cast his eyes toward her and blinked slowly. “How very sexist of you.” He looked back to Jack. “But yes. For Clarity. I did devise a work-around to suspected blind zone areas to our scanners, but for reasons of my own, I deemed it unnecessary to openly share my work with other members of our society.”

“And you don’t believe for a moment that your research and equative work may have been seen or stolen by someone else?”

“I’m CIA,” Narvin reminded him on a low and gravelled tone of voice. “My entire existence is covert operations and therefore it’s imperative that my work and movement are not stolen nor monitored…”

“Unless you want them to be,” Jack breathed out with slow and worried realisation. 

“Indeed,” he agreed. “So that said, if my work was discovered and, in some way, utilised for nefarious reasons, such as to intercept a treasonous Coordinator of the Celestial Intervention Agency…”

“Oh, shit.”

Narvin nodded. There was little to no fear at all in his eyes, his expression, nor his posture, but there was a waver in his voice that belied any fearlessness he was trying to suppress. “So, this is a rather opportune moment for me to suggest that you remove the ladies from the scene.” He swallowed. “They don’t need to be here when they arrive, and quite frankly I’d prefer they were as far away as possible.”

“And how do you propose I do that?” Jack snapped.

“You have a vortex manipulator affixed to your wrist.” His eyes fell to the wrist cuff of Jack’s thick overcoat. “I can feel the tremor in the timelines that one of those produces.” His eyes lifted again. “Use that and get them free. I will deal with the operatives on approach.”

Jack shook his head. “I can take you with us.”

Narvin’s face tightened and contorted to a wince of rejection to the offer. “I already have the means to travel that won’t reduce me to a penitent position to retch at the ground.” He turned his head to one side and drew in a breath. “Gallifreyan technology.”

“Not the time for a pissing contest,” Jack growled in reply.

Narvin shot him a hard look at the crude comment. His look softened lightly. “The more I run, the more they’ll hunt. I lead the CIA, Captain. I know how they operate, and just how tenacious and relentless they can be when on the hunt for a criminal.” He sniffed. “It’s best I face them head on and hope that I can still hold authority over whichever agent has captured my scent.”

“I won’t leave you alone,” he vowed with a shake in his head that was so slight only his eyes seemed to move with the action. “I can get the ladies free of here…”

“Not going anywhere,” Martha corrected sharply. “Give me a gun, Jack. I’ll stand with Narvin…”

“Oh, please don’t,” Narvin replied with a huff that falsely conveyed light embarrassment at having to count on a human to stand at his defence. 

“You don’t really have a choice, Spaceman,” Donna said with a smile and challenge in her voice for him to argue. “You don’t get to rescue us, then get the last word in and martyr yourself for it…”

Narvin raised a brow at her. “And just for what reason do you think I’d be in any way eager to martyr myself for you, or anyone on this low-level, unevolved planet?” He clenched his fists and turned toward the source of a breath of wind that began to blow across the concrete courtyard. “I only rescued the pair of you to prevent the Doctor embarking on an angry vengeful rampage in the capitol. Idiot would get himself killed.”

Jack stepped up to stand beside Narvin. “You did it for the Doctor?”

Narvin’s eye twitched. “If something happens to that renegade miscreant, then it will upset Braxiatel, which in turn will upset her Lady Romana.” He drew in a hard inhale through his nose. “And know this: If I fear anyone in the universe, Captain, it’s Romanadvoratrelundar.”

“I’d fear trying to pronounce the name alone,” Jack replied with a sniff. He pulled a firearm from a holster at his hip and offered it across to Narvin. “Is she really so terrifying?”

“You have no idea,” he replied thickly as his head lowered to the level to be able to glare through his brows toward whomever it would be that would cross time and space to find him. His eyes fell to the weapon in Jack’s hand, and to the absence of technology within it. He then looked away. “I have a staser, thank you.”

“Which can be neutralised if whoever’s coming knows which weapon you’re carrying.” He lifted the gun and looked it over. The corners of his mouth curled upward as he pressed a kiss to the barrel of the weapon and blinked quite seductively toward Narvin. “It might not have all the fancy bells and whistles of a Gallifreyan weapon, but this old girl….” He purred. “…won’t be rendered useless like a Gallifreyan weapon can.”

“Depends which Gallifreyan is wielding it,” Martha offered with a light chuckle under her breath as she stood at the other side of Narvin and spoke across his chest. “You’d never get one of those in the Doctor’s hand and have it survive the encounter.”

Narvin exhaled hard. He didn’t look at either of them. His focus was on the growing ball of light across the other end of the courtyard. “I really don’t think it matters which weapon one might choose to wield. I anticipate more than one of Rassilon’s operatives to materialise.” He sniffed. “Outnumbered in bodies and weaponry, trust me on that.”

“You’re a Time Lord,” Donna growled from behind him, her voice cutting across his cheek like a knife. “Can’t trust any one of you.”

“That’s probably the best advice you’ll ever hear in your life,” Narvin replied coolly. “Best you take it.” He drew in a deeper breath as the ball of light swelled and pulsed. Panic gripped tightly at his hearts, although he did his best to shield as much of it as he could. “Better yet, best you run. This is worse than I thought.”

“Not running anywhere,” Martha assured him. She leaned across him to snatch the gun from Jack’s hand. She looked up into Narvin’s face as she straightened up and settled the heavy weapon in her hand. “Like it or not, you’re going to fight alongside a human.”

He sniffed, not quite of the mind to waste time arguing with her. “Then if that’s the case, Martha, it might be a good idea for you to brace yourself for what’s on approach.”

She lifted the weapon, small though it was, and held it with both hands in a lazy aim ahead of her. The light hit it’s peak and tore open with a ripping sound that raced across the plass with an almost physical substance to it. She winced as though slapped across the face by it. “What, exactly, is on approach?”

He swallowed thickly. His eyes locked on the rip in the fabric of reality and the danger that lay on the other side of it. “This is the portal of a squadron,” he began quietly, his voice full of dread. “Not just a pair of operatives.”

Jack drew in a breath. “You have a plan, right?”

“Yes,” Narvin replied with a firm nod of his head. “Try not to do anything typically human and typically stupid that would get any of us killed.” As red-dressed soldiers filed in formation out of the tear in reality, he held back his shoulders and strode one step forward. He cleared his throat and lifted his head to address the captain of the Chancellery Guard with a tired look down along the length of his nose. “Captain Terkaik.”

The Captain of the Guard strode forward. His face bore an arrogant smile of victory, clearly bolstered by the loud sounds of his guards aiming their weapons. “Coordinator Narvin…”

“Narvinectralonum, if you don’t mind,” Narvin corrected with a sneer. “We are hardly on friendly terms right now.”

Terkaik sniffed and looked Narvin upward and then down. “Lord Narvinectralonum. By the order of his Lord Rassilon, Supreme President of Gallifrey , and the council of the Time Lords, you are under arrest and must return to Gallifrey for trial.” He lifted his head and smirked to one side. “I recommend you come quietly.”

“Yes,” Narvin drawled long. “I suspect that you do…”


	78. Cosplay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The brothers Lungbarrow have a mission.... 
> 
> ...So does Narvin, it seems.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just want to say that TW4 completely traumatised me .... totally and utterly shattered, I was.... Thank you to my Discord friends for letting me vent and doing their all to make me feel better.
> 
> In all of that trauma and complete gutting that I experienced, however, a good thing happened: My drive to write returned with a fury. 
> 
> So that said, out of practice me had to resettle myself into ficdom ... and for a first time out in a bit, crack the knuckles and put fingers to keyboard. And in that first outing I came up with this. 
> 
> I really do hope that you enjoy. For those of you that were also affected by TW4, come join me for a drink and a grizzle.... we can throw our shattered hearts into the fire and adjust our head canons to say: It all actually ended at Enemy Lines.....

~~oooOOOooo~~

_Meanwhile, 250 million light years away on Gallifrey: “What did you do?” Braxiatel accused with a harsh sound in his tone. He wove himself around his brother to stand at Narvin’s shoulder. His face was dark and full of accusation. “What have you done?”_

_“What needed to be done…” Narvin answered as she pulled open the door. Outside the TARDIS was a swath of men and women dressed in the white robe and black tabard ensemble worn only by members of the Celestial Intervention Agency – many of them holding firearms at aim. She couldn’t shield the smile of pride that pulled at the corners of her mouth. “…What members of the CIA are sworn to do.”_

_Braxiatel snapped a look at her and let out a growl. “What’s that: Deceit and betrayal?”_

_She levered him a furious expression to his charge. “Betrayal is what_ you _do, Brax. I_ intervene _…”_

Braxiatel didn’t bother to hide his expression of disdain toward Narvin. One side of his lip curled upward in disgust toward her. “And just who is it that you intend an intervention against?” He gestured between himself and the Doctor. “Us?”

Narvin flashed him a look but gave no answer at all besides her hard glare. She stepped out of the TARDIS and into a semi-circle clearance of space in the midst of a large grouping of CIA operatives. She lifted her chin and drew in a deep breath. Ahead of her a tall man, his hair greying lightly at the temples beside a pair of piecing green eyes, stepped forward. He adjusted the seat of his black tabard; the closure of the throat appearing to be too tight.

“Coordinator,” he drawled long in greeting.

“Agent Iannin,” Narvin returned with a rise in her brow. She gestured toward his throat with a lift of her chin. “Fresh off a regeneration, I assume?”

“An unfortunate incident with a Trulbripe,” he replied with a wry smile. 

“Misfortune follows a Trulbripe around like a stalker, Iannin,” she replied with a light sigh. “It is hard not to fall victim to the fallout. Are you able to continue, or do you require regeneration release from duty to return back to Gallifrey?” She smirked just lightly. “To your _appropriate_ timeline on Gallifrey, of course.”

Braxiatel made a light sound of question from behind. “I’m sorry… what did you say? _Appropriate_ timeline? These agents aren’t from now?” 

“Of course not,” she scoffed indignantly. “I didn’t trust half of the operatives assigned to my agency in this timeline when I was here. I most certainly do not trust them now.”

“I’m quite surprised you trust the ones in _your_ timeline,” the Doctor muttered dryly under his breath.

“Moreso than I do you at any rate,” she rertorted hotly with a turn back to her team. “Now…”

“Will this take a lot of time?” Braxiatel growled with a deliberate and obvious glance down toward his wrist and the golden face of an expensive Earth timepiece. “The less time spent here right now, the better. In case you’ve forgotten, we are on the hit list of Rassilon and it won’t take him too long to realise that we’re here.”

At his side, the Doctor pursed his lips with obvious agreement. “Yeah,” he drawled with a tug at his ear. “Might be better if we get a move on.” One side of his lips lifted in an attempt at a smirk of encouragement. “So, _Allonsy_ , then?”

Narvin didn’t look at either Time Lord as she dismissed them with a wave of her hand. She had operatives waiting for her orders, so the two of them could wait. She kept her eyes on her operative, who gazed upon Braxiatel and the Doctor with both brows curved high on his forehead. “Iannin? Ignore these fools if you will and look at me. I asked you a question, and I expect a response.”

His attention snapped toward her. “You ask if I wish to return to my appropriate timeline and miss all of the fun, Coordinator?” he asked with a smirk. His voice shifted to a light growl. “I’ve been waiting all my lives for this.”

Narvin’s smile fell toward an expression of displeasure. “Yes, well. I’ve been here before. Can’t recommend it. I would rather not have had to experience it again.” She lifted her chin in a gesture toward where he was still tugging at the collar of his tabard. “Do you have a change of tabard available?”

“No, Ma’am. With your permission, I’d much rather just lose it for now,” Iannin replied flatly. He sniffed in deep and pulled at the collar. “Prefer not to have to rely on my bypass to breathe.”

“Then lose it,” she decided firmly with a flick of her hand. “If you wish to insist on completing this assignment, then do so without distraction.”

Iannin quickly unzipped the tabard with an exhale of relief. He kept focus on the Coordinator as he flicked it off his shoulders and let it fall to the ground. He ignored the operative that stooped behind him to retrieve it and throw it on the desk at the side of the room. “As yet, we are unsure of just what it is you want us to do.”

“The briefing notes that I had prepared in advance of this assignment should have been provided to you by your Lord Chancellor,” Narvin said someone warily. “Were these not shared?”

Iannin opened his mouth to respond, but quickly slammed his jaw shut with Narvin lifted her hand and shook her head. “Ma’am,” was all he got out.

“Quite clearly they were not.” Narvin held her hands behind her back and straightened out her spine. She let her eyes scan across the gathering of operatives that had joined an assignment that was … well … that wasn’t exactly within the usual boundaries of their service.

“As it seems that your Lord Chancellor failed to share briefing documents with you all…” her words drew to a slow slur and her eyes shifted to Braxiatel at her side. They then shifted back to the group and her tone and voice returned to normal. “I will have to advise you myself.”

Braxiatel’s mouth contorted into a frown. His eyes lifted in a partial upward roll. “Is it necessary for Thete and I to wait around for this, or are you able to handle your _briefing_ on your own?” His eyes caught the lift of her hand to gesture for him to wait, and he slapped that hand back down. “In your timeline, Narvin I am your superior.”

Narvin snorted. “In no timeline are you superior to me, Brax. Despite the heights in which you imagine you reach.” A snickering from within her group, and Narvin shot a glare back toward the snickering operatives. “However, in all timelines he is _yours_ , so no snickering.”

Braxiatel rolled his eyes with frustration and clear annoyance. “We’ll just leave you to it, then, shall we?” He gestured toward the Doctor. “Thete and I will retrieve the robot.”

“If you must.”

He strode toward the door, confident that the Doctor was at his rear and following. He looked down his shoulder, but not behind him to look at her. “I must, indeed, Narvin. Do me a favour and keep out of trouble. Rassilon knows you’re not exactly jeopardy-free, and Thete and I really don’t have the time … nor _really_ , the inclination … to come to your rescue.”

A grumble growled out from the group. “Good thing the Coordinator has an entire squad at her disposal, isn’t it, Lord Chancellor?”

“Yes,” he drawled long with a twist in his shoulders to look back at the agent. His brows pulled tightly together to see his brother weave through the crowd toward Narvin’s desk. “Thete, what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he called back with a grin in his voice as he snatched the discarded black tabard from the desktop. He turned to look back at Narvin with a toothy grin of cheek and a lift of question in his brows. “Where can I find…?”

Narvin quickly answered with a lift of her hand to point toward the door. “You wish for me to run with: Best I don’t ask?”

“That’s right,” he returned with a chipper tone and a bright smile on his face. “Best that you don’t.” He wove through the very edge of the crows toward the door to pull a white robe from a hook behind the door. He passed a smile toward Narvin. “Thank you.”

“Yes,” she drawled long. “Don’t mention it.” She drew in a breath of pause. “…Ever.”

Braxiatel drew in a displeased breath and exhaled a bland and flat voice. “We’ll ensure it’s added to the yearbook.”

“…the year _what_?”

“Never mind.” He looked toward his brother. “Well? Are you ready?”

The Doctor jogged to his brother. There was a light one-sided smirk on his face, and even a wink, as they stepped through the doorway as a pair and entered the corridor. There was a muffle inside his voice as he pulled the light cotton garment over his head and struggled to get lanky arms comfortably through sleeves much shorter than the cuffs of his blazer. “I take it you know where we’re going?”

“I do.”

The Doctor didn’t comment at all. He waited for his brother to continue, maybe let him know where they were actually headed. After a moment he looked expectantly toward Braxiatel as he smoothed the robe down over his suit and wrapped the cowl of the tabard around his neck.

Braxiatel didn’t need the Doctor to clarify what information he was looking for, he could feel the question from the piercing brown-eyed stare. He let out a long breath. “There really is no sense at all in me clarifying the location for you, Thete. It isn’t like you understand the layout of this part of the citadel.”

“Politeness insists that you should,” he replied coolly. “What if we get separated and one of us gets lost? It would be pertinent for all parties to know the destination, wouldn’t you say?” He settled the tabard comfortably on his shoulders with a hum in the back of his throat. A comfortable fit and the Doctor was thankful that the Lord who discarded it had shoulders set at the same width as his. “Really, it’s not like I can stop and ask directions now, is it?” 

“Particularly not dressed like that.”

The distaste within Braxiatel’s voice was unmistakable, which was curious given his clear friendship with Narvin.

“We are not _Friends_ ,” Braxiatel clarified quickly, leaving the Doctor to wonder if he had expressed that thought out loud. A look toward his Brother, and he could see Brax’s shoulders tighten at the idea.

“Then what are you?” he queried somewhat flatly.

“What we are,” he continued, “are acquaintances of a long standing nature.”

“Who have come to rely upon each other over the centuries,” he offered. “For more than just political alliance.”

“Perhaps.”

The Doctor shrugged. “In other words: _Friends_.”

One side of Braxiatel’s mouth curled downward with displeasure. “You have your interpretation of what it is to be _friends_ , and I have mine.” He held a hand out to his side to catch the Doctors chest with the back of it. He lowered the volume of his usually booming timbre. “A moment, Thete.”

The Doctor did as asked and remained a half step behind his brother. He leaned forward slightly in an attempt to look past Braxiatel’s chest, curious as to what – or who – might be capable of stopping the otherwise fearless man in his tracks. He saw no one, but could hear a light sound of footsteps deep inside the corridor.

“Who is it?” he queried on little more than a whisper.

“Chancellery Guard,” Braxiatel answered in a whisper that held just as much authority within it as his voice usually had. “Security team of four.” His voice fell toward a more curious and contemplative tone meant only to be acknowledged by himself. “Well, that is unusual, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” the Doctor queried curiously against his ear.

The puff of breath on his ear made Braxiatel jump just slightly with surprise. He quickly swatted his brother away. “Highly unusual,” he confirmed. “We are still in the wing housing the Celestial Intervention Agency … There shouldn’t be _any_ Chancellery Guards here.”

“What does that mean?”

Braxiatel turned quickly toward the Doctor at that question. There was clear frustration in his eyes and in the hitch of his breath. “I do believe that your question perfectly illustrates just how important it is that you spend a little more time on Gallifrey and less time gallivanting around the universe, don’t you?”

“I don’t quite see how –“

“Because if you had any actual understanding of the more recent changes in the capitol that would allow such movements as the Chancellery Guard through CIA property.” He drew in a hard sniff. “Such knowledge would serve you well if you intend on performing any type of illicit underground mission of thievery against our Lord President…”

The Doctor hummed a short sound. “You have no idea yourself, do you?”

“Absolutely none,” he confirmed with a crease settling at the centre of his brow. “I’ve been away myself for too long as well.”

“I can ask them if you want,” the Doctor offered with a light smile shadowing otherwise straightened lips. He lifted his eyes to look up at his brother. “Get some intel, make sure that we’re not headed into some kind of ambush…”

“Ambush would imply that we are expected,” Braxiatel replied with little more than a grunt in his tone. 

“Aren’t we?”

“Being expected would suggest that Rassilon and the Council believe the both of us to be imbeciles.”

“How do you draw that conclusion?” The Doctor asked with a light sniff. 

Braxiatel drew some form of satisfaction that their way was now clear, and he strode forward into the corridor. “Because for either of us to return to Gallifrey – despite both being under execution orders would be the act of an imbecile.”

“And yet here we are,” the Doctor drawled with the smallest hint of a laugh in his words. He looked around them as he stepped up to fall into stride beside Braxiatel. “Both of us considered complete cowards by all of our society…”

“Speak for yourself, thank you.”

“…and yet here we are, the brothers Coward bravely striding through the hallways of the Citadel. ” He flicked his eyes upward to see the roll of the eyes his brother was no doubt executing with his usual dramatic brilliance. “Well, not so much bravely, I suppose. Idiocy of this nature is hardly brave, is it? And so allow me to assure you that I do, indeed, share in your eye-roll there, Brax. Share it and raise you a facepalm and groan of ‘ _Why did we agree to this_?’”

“Because what Romana wants,” Braxiatel stated flatly. “Romana gets.”

“I would mimic the crack of a whip, Brax…” the Doctor sighed inside the pause. “But I’m afraid, I’m equally as guided by the needs and wants of my wife as you are yours.”

“Are you really?” Braxiatel queried with genuine curiosity toward the question. “Because history has shown quite the opposite, hasn’t it?”

“Brax...” 

It was a warning, pure and simple. Braxiatel was stepping on dangerous ground, and he knew it. A smarter man might back off, but as he’d only moments ago suggested himself an imbecile, he chose to stride forward on this. If only to pass time between now and his old office.

“There was a reason that Rose came to you in your Eight incarnation, Thete, after running from your current one.”

“I reason that I am quite aware of, thank you, Brax.” He drew in a breath hard enough that it was a low growl. “And I’ll thank you to mind your business on matters concerning Rose and myself.”

“I cannot, I’m afraid,” Braxiatel said with a breath. “Because when she hurts, so do the children, and therefore so do I. Those children are my universe, Thete. Their happiness, and safety is of my greatest concerns.” He kept his eyes straight ahead. “My vow to you – the one that says I will rip them all from you if you do wrong by them – is not a mere threat. Do remember that the next time your feet and hearts dare dance away from them.”

“We are not having this conversation now,” the Doctor snarled darkly. “This is not the time.”

Braxiatel exhaled out slowly. His voice shifted to a hard whisper of a sound as he lifted his shoulders to his jaw. “Because it may very well be the only opportunity we have…”

The Doctor’s posture shifted from rising fury into alarm and worry. “You have a feeling of foreboding, Brax?”

“A shudder along my timeline, Thete?” He nodded slowly. “Indeed. A memory surrounded in haze.”

There was clear concern inside the Doctor’s voice. “You’ve been here before?” When Braxiatel didn’t immediately answer, the Doctor stepped ahead of him to stop him in his tracks. He took hold of his lapel to force him to look at him. “In this time, at this moment?”

Braxiatel held back the shudder that raced down along his spine and shifted worried blue eyes toward his brother. “It would seem that I have.” He looked away from the Doctor with a wince across his brow and a pinch in his eye. “And although the moment is very unclear in my mind – I can see that I was not here alone.”

“Future you?”

Braxiatel snapped a look toward his brother. “If it was a future me, then why would I _remember_ it? No, a future me would be foretelling rather than remembering.”

“It was wishful thinking, okay?” the Doctor offered. “Someone who knows exactly what we are heading into would be a helpful party, don’t you think?”

“I would think what we are heading toward to be quite clear, don’t you?” he snapped hard.

The Doctor hardly seemed to notice his brother’s rising ire. Instead he pursed his lips and looked back down the corridor behind them. “The one person who could tell us… well … we left her behind, didn’t we?”

“Narvin wouldn’t tell us anyway,” Braxiatel muttered. “She is obviously staging her own assignment, and therefore has very litter interest in what the two of us are doing.”

“I wonder just what it is that she’s up to,” the Doctor mused to himself.

“Clearly CIA,” he offered with a shrug. “So clearly shady and underhanded business.”

The Doctor paused a moment to drag his eyes up and down the length of his brother’s proud posture. His analysis was obvious and very deliberately done to warrant a query of what are you doing. Braxiatel refused to acquiesce any such reactions. He kept his eyes ahead of him.

Finally, the Doctor gave up his analysis and turned his eyes to the front. “I’m surprised you didn’t join the CIA,” he murmured underneath his breath.

“Why? Because I am sneaky, underhanded, and untrustworthy?” Braxiatel replied calmly. He snorted out with a smirk. “My brand of underhandedness is much better suited for politics, thank you.” She shifted his eyes toward the back tabard surrounding his brother’s throat. “Yours, on the other hand, much more geared toward effective cosplaying, I suspect?”

The Doctor didn’t look at him, but one side of his face crinkled with a smile. “While you may want to openly swagger through the Capitol corridors as though you still own the right to do so, I prefer a less ostentatious presence.”

“Since when?” Braxiatel scoffed with a laugh of disbelief. “Since you were a loomling, you stood front and centre for attention. When did all of that change?”

“As you have repeatedly proven over your own lives, deception can quite often be the biggest tool in your arsenal.” He rolled his head on his shoulders with a light wince at the pull of the tabard. “While I don’t subscribe to your rather impressive brand of it, finding a disguise is a fancy I’ve taken to throughout the years.” He grinned widely at his brother. “It’s rather fun, sometimes, being right under the noses of those I’m supposed to be hiding from.”

“I wouldn’t wager on your changes of blending in around here, I’m afraid,” he replied with a sniff. “It’s hard to hide your presence from Time Lords.”

“Won’t be the first time I’ve done it,” the Doctor said with a shrug as he recalled walking in disguise within the panopticon back when he had big hair, wore a long scarf, and always had a bag of jelly babies in his pocket. “And despite your foreboding, it won’t be the last…”

“I find it rather pointless, myself,” Braxiatel murmured. He took a look to the side, then took hold of the Doctor’s upper arm inside a tight grasp. “This way,” he growled low with warning as he hard-palmed a small indent in the wall. A small door hissed open. “Get inside, he ordered hard.”

The Doctor looked startled for a moment, and staggered into a stumble on the other side of the door. He noted, with concern, that his brother wasn’t following him inside. “Brax?” he queried with warning as he regained stable footing and stepped forward. “What’re you doing.”

“Get to my office,” he ordered firmly. “The Robot’s brain is…” He looked to the side with a flick of his head, then turned back toward his brother. There was urgency inside his blue eyes. “K-9’s main processor is in my desk. The robot himself, well. I have a lab. Find it.”

The Doctor’s face shifted toward utter confusion and worry. “And you, what will you be doing?”

“Getting arrested,” he answered with a deep inhale to steel himself against what h knew was coming.

“Then come with…”

“Go!” Braxiatel hissed out. “If they’ve got me, then their attention will be off you.” With a one-sided frown of a smile, he slapped the door to shut them away from each other. “I’m sorry, Thete. Please, be safe.”

“Lord Braxiatel,” a low voice growled out from his rear. “We’ve been expecting you.”

“Yes, I suspect you have,” he replied with a deep inhale as he slowly turned to face the tall man in Chancellery Guard uniform. “Captain…?”

The young man’s mouth tipped upward to a one-sided grin. “Ansel,” he replied. “ _Commander_ Ansel.”

Braxiatel merely hummed in reply.

Ansel took a stride backward and extended a hand to one side. “This way, Sir.”

Braxiatel straightened his shoulders and set his face into an expressionless façade. “After _you_ , Commander.”

~~oooOOOooo~~


	79. CIA

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Narvin has a plan ... But Narvin doesn't know what it is

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still rusty, be warned. But I'm giving it a shot, anyway.... Putting my duckies in their rows...
> 
> I very much hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

_“Narvinectralonum, if you don’t mind,” Narvin corrected with a sneer. “We are hardly on friendly terms right now.”_

_Terkaik sniffed and looked Narvin upward and then down. “Lord Narvinectralonum. By the order of his Lord Rassilon, Supreme President of Gallifrey, and the council of the Time Lords, you are under arrest and must return to Gallifrey for trial.” He lifted his head and smirked to one side. “I recommend you come quietly.”_

_“Yes,” Narvin drawled long. “I suspect that you do…”_

Terkaik waited rather patiently for Narvin to move, however he seemed rather reluctant to be the initiator of the walk toward arrest. Irritation fell quickly upon the leader of the Chancellery Guard squadron. He grabbed a rough hold of Narvin’s arm. “I said now.”

Narvin didn’t budge at all, despite the searing urge within him to jerk away roughly. “What will happen to the humans?” he asked in a low voice. “Are they to be arrested as well?”

“Their memories will be erased,” Terkaik answered with a flick of his eyes toward Jack.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Donna growled out with forced bravado. She stepped forward and poked her finger hard at her temple. “You lot aren’t getting in here to take anythin’ away. You hear me?”

Terkaik flicked angry eyes toward her. The expression of disdain toward her was clear. “You don’t exactly have a choice, human. His Lord Rassilon has ordered it.”

“Yeah, well he might be your President, but he’s not mine. Not the President of anyone of Earth.” She adopted much the same expression as Terkaik but added an openly disparaging look of appraisal up and down his body. “Hashtag, check which planet you’re on, idiot.” She looked to Martha with a smile of victory when she gave a laugh at the jab.

Terkaik flicked a look toward Narvin. “Would you mind instructing your … _pets_ … to remain quiet.” He flicked an angry glare toward Donna. “Arguing about it is a waste of all our time…”

“The irony of that statement being clearly lost on you,” Narvin said with a huff and a shake in his head. “If my interaction with Humans has proven anything, it’s that they don’t really like being told what to do.” His head tilted in the other direction, a most condescending head movement. “Nor do they appreciate being referred to as _pets_.”

“Not when the one givin’ the orders and calling me names is an _idiot_ ,” Donna muttered with false bravado shifting more eagerly toward total confidence. She flicked her hand dismissively. “So, get lost, pretty-boy, and take all of your pretty little soldiers with you.”

Terkaik let out a long growl of annoyance and irritation. “Your kind really are very annoying, aren’t you? Very much like an bothersome Afrerygnat of the Southern Mountains.” His lip lifted in a disgusted curl. “Miserable little creatures.”

Donna grunted in reply. She held back from remarking only because of a tug on the back of her shirt and light hiss of warning from Jack to ignore him and let Narvin handle it.

“And do you know what we do to the Afrerygnat, Human? Do you?” He lifted his staser with an exaggerated outward lift of his arm. He smirked as he looked down its length toward her.

Narvin dipped his head into his shoulders with warning. “Terkaik, leave it. I’ll surrender myself, just leave these humans alone.”

“I am _Commander_ ,” he growled with correction. There was a flare of fury in his eyes as he switched his focus from Donna to Narvin. “And you’d be best served remembering that, _former_ CIA Coordinator Narvin.”

Narvin merely smirked. “If you say so.” He shifted his gaze to look at the staser still held at aim toward Donna. “Now if you will, put that thing down before anyone gets hurt.”

“I have orders from our President,” Terkaik reminded him with a scowl of victory. “And the removal of memories does tend to be a rather painful experience to have to endure. Hurting someone is just par for this particular course.”

Narvin put himself in between the gun and Donna. He held up both hands that served as a gesture of both warning and of surrender. “It would serve you well not to harm these humans in any way at all.” He drew in a breath through gritted teeth. “Leave them alone. Take me.”

Terkaik shifted his hand to rotate the muzzle of his weapon left and right against Narvin’s chest. It was positioned between the Time Lord’s hearts, so a shot would not be in any way fatal. It was … tempting to consider. “Since when do you defend and protect humans, Narvin?”

“They’re acquaintances with the Lord Doctor, Terkaik,” he answered with a sniff. “I’m protecting myself much more than I am them.” He gave a slow blink of his eyes. “I’d much rather not be caught in the Doctor’s sights for allowing any one of those he cares about to come to harm, thank you.”

Tarkaik dropped his weapon and let his head fall backward to bellow out a laugh of complete incredulity at Narvin’s admittance of a fear of the Lord Doctor. It was a laugh that bellowed across the plass. Behind him, several of the red dressed soldiers allowed themselves to get caught up in the laughter themselves.

Narvin took a moment to shift his eyes across the crowd of red suited men. Not all of them were wholly on board with the orders that sent them off Gallifrey. He didn’t need to send out a telepathic wave to figure that out. Their glassy eyed expressions and the shaky, unwilling hold of their weapons into a lazy aim that made that crystal clear to him. He had very little doubt that a firestorm would erupt if he was to stubbornly defy the orders of President Rassilon.

A flick of his eyes toward Terkaik and he determined that one gunman was just as dangerous as an entire squadron of trigger-happy soldiers, and so he held his wrists together and slowly lifted them up in front of him. “As I said,” he drolled with careful warning in his tone. “I’ll come with you quietly. Just leave these…” His words paused a moment as he felt a tingle race across his shackles. It was a familiar sensation, a very sensitive sensation, one only felt by a Time Lord with several centuries of telepathic sensitivity training under his belt…

…Much like the training endured by all C.I.A. operatives. 

…C.I.A., _not_ Chancellery Guard. 

He cleared his throat and coughed into his fist in order to hide the fact he had paused because of a temporal warning. 

And to hide his smile.

“As I was saying. Leave these humans alone,” he forced with a croak in his voice. “They are harmless to Gallifrey, and to the future plans of Lord Rassilon.” He swallowed thickly as the tingle moved toward a full shudder. His voice was strangled as he quickly catalogued the sensation and felt the slightest part of him find some form of actual hope. “Insignificant.”

“I’ll give you insignificant,” Donna growled with clear offence in her tone.

At her rear, Jack growled against her ear for silence; to let Narvin handle this. His hand was a tight ball around the lower back of her shirt to hold her in place.

Terkaik holstered his firearm into a leather-like holster at his hip. He drew a set of cuffs from another pouch beside the holster and gave them a hard flick. A deep blue light quickly circled the rounded metal. With a wretched smile toward Narvin’s unreadable expression, he snatched hold of Narvin’s left wrist.

“Is that necessary?” Narvin queried flatly. He didn’t fight Terkaik’s grasp of his wrist at all. He didn’t even look at their hands. His eyes remained on the piercing green and yellow that seemed more focused on task than on man.

Terkaik responded with a huff. “One thing I’ve learned in my years serving with the Chancellery Guard is that members of the C.I.A. are not to be trusted. Even when in custody, one must keep them contained and tethered.”

“It’s not often an operative of my Agency…”

“Former,” Terkaik corrected harshly. “It’s not your agency anymore.’

“Indeed,” Narvin growled low. “As I was saying, however. It’s not often that one of the operatives of the C.I.A. does end up in custody.”

Terkaik snorted as he fixed the first cuff and moved to lock Narvin’s other wrist. His eyes and his head were held low. “Half of your squad are criminal-types, Narvin. I’m surprised the need to arrest one or all of you hasn’t come up.”

Narvin dropped his head just enough that his breath raked through Terkaik’s hair. Around them, the air began to crackle with static and hazy blue light. “I never said the need hasn’t come up, _Commander_ …”

Terkaik remained in his stoop, but his head shot upward. His eyes widened with horror as zap after zap, and flash after flash, revealed one white-robed C.I.A. operative after another. All of them with stasers held to their eye in a tight and locked aim. Each Agent had aim squarely upon a Chancellery Guard; one on one.

His voice was a blustered whisper of utter confusion. “What the …. What is this?”

Narvin straightened up to his full height and looked toward Terkaik’s stunned expression with a look of disdain. “What I said is that it’s not often one of us end up in custody.” He snorted loud and heavy through his nose. “Really, I thought they taught basic listening and comprehension skills at the Academy.”

“Coordinator Narvin,” Iannin called in a voice that boomed loudly across the plass. “A little bird mentioned that you might be need of a little support.”

There was no shielding his surprise as he considered just which _bird_ might have been kind enough to send support. Only one sprung to mind. “The Cardinal sent you?”

“No Sir,” he corrected with a smirk. “ _You_ did.”

There was a mild tic in his eye as he considered the most recent nickname given to his Agency by the refugee members of the Estrail encampment but chose not to remark on it. Instead he held his temporally cuffed wrists outward. “I see. And was I tall, brunette, and female when I sent you here?”

Terkaik lowered his weapon and straightened up. His staser was dropped into a hip holster and he strode toward Narvin. There was a light smirk on his face. “This is the first time we’ve met where you haven’t matched that description, Sir,” he replied as he pressed the tip of a sonic device into the light of the cuffs.

“Where is your tabard?” He asked coolly to effect an abrupt change of topic. It was clear all of these operatives were from a far distant future. A future he was glad to know that he, and Gallifrey, still had ahead of them.

Iannin looped a hand underneath Narvin’s wrist to catch the cuffs as they fell. “I regenerated and was unable to apply for a new uniform before coming to this timestream, sir. You allowed me to forego the tabard for now.” A smile stretched. “I believe his Lord Sigma has it now.”

“For what possible reason could he….?” He shook his head and held up a hand. “No. Never mind. Best that I don’t know.”

Iannin chuckled deeply, but refrained from commenting further. Instead he took position at Narvin’s side and retrieved his staser. His eyes locked on Terkaik and all friendliness fled. “Commander Terkaikmathraendrie. Under Section 72 of the Celestial Intervention Agency, article 17, subsection 3, you are being taken into the custody of our operatives until such time as the council decree that the articles no longer apply…”

Narvin spoke out of the side of his mouth. “No such articles exist.”

“They don’t need to know that, Sir.”

“Right.”

Iannin stepped forward and put himself chest to chest with Terkaik. Both men sneered with clear disdain for each other. “Care to come quietly,” he asked after a short moment. Across the plass, the sounds of Chancellery Guards being relieved of their weaponry by the C.I.A. Operatives sounded out loudly. “Or do I get to use undue and unreasonable force to take you in?”

“You won’t get away with this,” Terkaik snarled. “I’m operating under the orders of his Lord Rassilon, President of Gallifrey.”

Iannin thrust a hand forward to snatch Terkaik’s weapon from his holster. “In my timeline, Rassilon’s been in his tomb for centuries. We act under the orders of our Lady Romanadvoratrelundar, the true and righteous President of Gallifrey.”

Narvin snorted. “Can’t say I’ve ever heard her described in any such manner.”

“You’re a long way from home,” Iannin suggested. 

Narvin shook his head slowly. “No. Not _that_ far.” He shifted his eyes toward the rest of the grouping, and of red-suited Chancellery Guards being led toward a waiting TARDIS. “I expect you have an actual plan, proper assignment parameters …. And won’t be taking any of these people back into your own timeline.”

Iannin sniffed. “We know what we’re doing. You …” He smirked and offered a cheeky wink. “Might be best you take notes. After all, it was you who created the parameters for this specific assignment.” 

“I see.” He cleared his throat and lifted his chin high. “And that is?”

Iannin grinned widely. “Oh. You’ll see.” He flicked his hands toward the three humans that were watching with wide eyes from their tight huddle at Narvin’s rear. “You three. You need to come with us. This planet isn’t safe for you right now.”

“I don’t think so, Sunshine,” Donna snapped indignantly. “I’m not goin’ back to bloody Gallifrey any time soon. Been there, done that, didn’t even get a T-shirt.”

A frown of confusion passed by Iannin’s eyes. “I have no idea what that means.”

Another operative strode by him, dragging a half reluctant Chancellery guard along with him. “Think that means you’ve been rebuffed, Agent Ian.”

“Isn’t he a clever one,” Donna said flatly around a wide smile that was anything but friendly. “If you want me to leave planet Earth, then you bring the Doctor here. You have the Doctor come and get me. I’m not trusting a man in a dress to keep me safe.”

“It’s a tunic,” Narvin corrected. “Not a dress. And when it comes to my operatives, you are safer with them than you are the Doctor.”

“Try and sell it all you want,” she said with a grunt. “I’m not buying it.”

Martha petted her arm. “Perhaps we should go,” she said gently. “Narvin hasn’t given me any reason not to trust him.”

Another Operative bellowed out a laugh as she walked past, dragging a guard along with her. “Give him time, Human.”

Narvin shot her a glare. “Really?”

The young operative cleared her throat and reddened under his displeased stare. “Ehm. Apology, Coordinator.”

Narvin looked back toward the obvious leader of the group. His eyes pinched at the inner corners and his arms folded across his chest. “Do what you were sent to do, I won’t argue. Take the Doctor’s friends to safety. I have to return to Gallifrey.”

“No, Sir.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re coming as well, Sir,” Iannin warned him. “Your orders were very specific. All the Guard, yourself, and the three Companions of Lord Sigma. All of them need to be transported from Earth to a planet where they will be safe until the successful rise of our people against Rassilon.”

“Treason!” Terkaik snarled. “Why am I not surprised it comes at the hands of the C. I. A.?” He made sure to accentuate each letter for harder and more disgusted impact. “He created you. Created all of you.”

“Enough from you,” Iannin muttered. “None of us are listening.” He gave him a forward shove and looked to Narvin. “You’re needed there to assist with pulling together what we need to finish this, Sir.”

“There being?”

“Estrail, Sir. Time is almost up, and there is a lot left to do.” He blew out a breath. “Lady Romana is not fully equipped to do this alone.”

Narvin frowned. “She has Braxiatel and the Doctor.”

Iannin’s head shook in a very slow and controlled manner. “I’m afraid not, Sir. Romana won’t have the Doctor, nor Lord Braxiatel at all. Between now and the final confrontation … they are …” He sniffed and winced. “Incapacitated. It’s going to take every single one of us, the Celestial Intervention Agency, to make sure that this timeline runs as it needs to, and that victory goes to the right side.”

“Is there a risk that it won’t?”

“We wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t.” He looked toward Jack, Martha, and Donna. “And I apologise to you for this obvious and uncomfortable inconvenience, but it is necessary, I’m afraid.”

Narvin nodded to the trio and waved his hand ahead of him in a gesture to suggest that they do as they were told and follow. “Best we follow. If I sent these men and women, then I make a guarantee to you that you will be safe. And I’m quite sure that Rose will he happy to see you all as well.”

Jack’s brows shot high. “Rose? She’s there as well?”

“If the Doctor’s there, it’s safe to assume she is there also,” Martha answered with a light rise and fall in her shoulders to suggest a chuckle. 

“Well, then. What are we waiting for?” Jack opened both his arms and hooked his fists into his hips to offer his elbows to both Marth and Donna. “I’m certainly up for a bit of underhanded plotting against evil dictators, what about you?”

Narvin’s brows were set in a frown as he watched the three of them follow one of his future operatives toward a waiting capsule. To suggest his was discomforted was a gross understatement. Nothing about any of this made any sense, nor followed any regulation or guideline he’d ever created.

“Lord Braxiatel and the Doctor are, as you described them, incapacitated right now.”

Iannin nodded slowly. “That’s correct.”

“And why is that?” He sniffed in hard, not entirely wanting confirmation of the fear swirling inside his mind, but knowing it was a confirmation he needed if he was about to come face to face with Rose and Romana. “They are supposed to be on Estrail.”

“ _Supposed to be,_ yes,” he answered. “However, they’re both nowhere near Estrail right now.”

“Where are they?”

“Where do you think?”

Narvin rubbed at his brow and winced against his palm. “Why, in the name of the Goddess, would either of them be so damn foolish as to go to Gallifrey when I have warned them repeatedly that to do so would be suicide?” He snapped up a hand. “Please don’t answer that. I already know the reason: They’re imbeciles, both of them.”


	80. Subterranean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor plays pig-rat in the catacombs of the Citadel, and manages to find a couple of old friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Family Day to all of my Ontario friends.....
> 
> Hope you enjoy this chapter.
> 
> See you Tuesday. :)

~~oooOOOOooo~~

Skulking through dusty, damp, and smelly corridors wasn’t exactly something that new or foreign to the Doctor. Frankly, it had become something of a regular exercise for him in recent years... decades … centuries. He’s spent so much time underground in tunnels and corridors that he could practically label himself a subterranean if he so chose to do so.

Which he actually didn’t.

And really, while he was subterranean right at this very moment inside an airless tunnel chamber of damp muskiness, it wasn’t the _worst_ place he’d ended up in. By all accounts it was pretty clean and bearable. Well. Excluding, of course, the random piles of animal bones that seemed far too organised in their array to be natural. That would be something he might want to query with Braxiatel or Romana at another time…

His nose turned up at the tinkle of thin, brittle bones as a pile lost its structural integrity at the draught from his robe he passed by. He skittered backward from it with a hop on one foot. He let out a groan and forced his body into a shudder of distaste. He even feigned a retch to force his disgusted state.

“Something tells me it wasn’t the Pigrat that made all of these piles.” He continued in an indecipherable muttering to himself as he turned away from the now disheveled pile of bones to forge ahead. He looked around him warily. “But something did.” He exhaled a lightly shaking breath and felt a shudder rock him from shoulders to his feet. “Something that I’ve decided I won’t want identified before I find myself well and truly out of ….” His eyes widened when he saw a vertical slit of light in the wall; a doorway. With a cheer held down tightly inside his throat, he quickly ran toward the light. He hauled it open and stepped into a brightly lit corridor. 

He drew in a deep and gulping breath of fresh air … well … air that was fresher than it was down inside the catacombs at any rate.

The gulp of air, and the exhale of utter relief had him stumble quite awkwardly for a moment, which gave him a slightly drunken-looking swagger. The doctor thought very little of it until he caught the questioning stare of a pair of Chancellery Guards standing at the wall across from him. His eyes blinked to open wide and he let out a somewhat strangled laugh as he found his footing and straightened up.

“Well, hello,” he drawled out happily. “Fancy seeing you here.”

One of the guards looked him up and then down with very little actual interest. It was analysis done only for show. “Shouldn’t be a surprise. This is the Citadel, after all.”

“Ahhhh,” the Doctor replied along a deep open-mouthed inhale. “ _That’s_ where I ended up?”

One of the guards pulled from his lean on the wall. His hands tightened their grip on a gun that was almost half his bulk in girth. “Seeing one of your kind here, now _that’s_ an oddity.” 

The Doctor’s eyes remained wide, but his brows lowered down over them in a frown of confusion. He tilted his head curiously. “I’m _sorry_? Just what is _that_ supposed to mean?” In his lower peripheral vision, he saw the black and white that was covering his chest. Quickly he realised just where the rather rude comments were rooted. “Oh. Yes. That’s right.”

The guard sniffed and offered the Doctor a dirty smirk of what was clearly a competitive nature. “Then again, all of your kind are … _odd_ … aren’t you?”

“And just what kind is that?” the Doctor challenged with a rise in his chin and a quickly morphing expression if distaste crossing his features. “A Gallifreyan? A Time Lord?” He brushed his hands down the arms of the black tabard and squared his shoulders. “Surely you don’t judge based solely on the uniform of a Gallifreyan who has taken oath to protect and defend Gallifrey and all of her children, her technology, and time herself.”

“Look…” He drawled, clearly searching his mind for a counter argument.

“Now, a Chancellery Guard, on the other hand, all red and white and pretty looking. You’re tasked with just what, exactly? Protecting the President and the citadel?” He thumbed his nose. “Well. You ask me….”

“Which he didn’t,” the guard’s female partner interrupted quickly with a slap of the back of her hand against her partner’s chest. “Don’t mind Gruargin, he still nurses a bruised ego from the slaying he received at the last Zero-Grav Hyperball tournament at the hands of the C.I.A. team.”

The doctor’s brows lifted. “Zero-Grav Hyperball?” His mouth stretched into a wide grin. “Oh,” he exhaled with a happy growl. “I loved that game!”

She smirked. “Yes, well he didn’t.” she flicked her hand backward to her partner. “Still recovering from the defeat.” She rolled her shoudlers to straighten up. “Now. Gruargin does make a good point. C.I.A. don’t usually show their robes around here. Care to explain just why you are?”

A rather guilty expression passed through the Doctor’s eyes as he tried quickly to formulate a reasonable excuse. “Oh, err. Yes. Well. About that…..”

“I’m waiting.”

He swallowed and rubbed his hand on the back of his neck, which was slowly sinking into his shoulders. “Yeah. Might’ve taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.”

Her brows lifted. “I’m sorry?”

He let out a breathy laugh. “Well, you see. I might’ve gotten a bit lost when I decided to take a wander through the catacombs from the C.I.A. offices.” He yanked at his ear and looked away from the guard. “Guess I took a wrong turn. Thought I was on the right path, obviously wasn’t.”

“One would think a member of the pig-rat pack might have a better sense of direction down in the sewers, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh shut up,” he snapped back hard, then quickly drew back his annoyance to straighten up and widen his eyes with curiosity. “And speaking of Pig-rats. What happened down there to…”

“Where were you headed,” the female guard interrupted impatiently.

“Oh, ehm. Yes.” The doctor replied with a light clear in the back of his throat. “Well. I was looking for, oh, ehm. “ He sniffed. “Irving Braxiatel’s office, actually.”

Gruargin took a hard step forward, his shoulders. “That treasonous….”

The Doctor managed only a low and insulted growl to rumble inside his chest by way of response. It was the female guard, the clear mediator between men, who got any word in.

“Why are you looking for Braxiatel’s office?”

The look he threw toward Gruargin was one of fire, but his voice was far more friendly. “Our offices received some intelligence…”

“Such as it is,” Gruargin snarled.

“Okay. That’s it.” He held up his hand to the sneering guard and turned to face his partner completely shutting him out. “I’m through speaking with him.”

“It’s for the best,” she replied with a light smile. “Now, if you will. Please continue.”

The Doctor drew in a deep breath and exhaled a lightly flirtatious laugh. “Yes. Of course.” He pulled out his brightest smile, which faltered just slightly when she didn’t seem to be all that warm to his flirt. “Ehm. As I was saying: there has been some intelligence received by our offices that may have a potential location for Lord Braxiatel and the resistance…”

“Find the brother, too, while you’re at it,” Gruargin said with a growl.

The Doctor let out a huff. “Why? Are you looking for a date there, big fella?” He tipped his head to one side and offered an obviously exaggerated and faux expression of apology. “Sorry. Word is the old boy is married. Soul bonded. He won’t be interested at all. Although I’m sure he’d be flattered.” He tipped his head back to the other guard. “Anyway, to get back to point. The Coordinator feels that there may be something in his office that might help with our investigation.”

She nodded slowly as though taking her time to properly absorb, analyse, and then assess what he was saying to determine its authenticity. Her head remained in a slow nod. The thumbed to one side to gesture toward a door only a foot or so away from where they stood. “You do realise that his office has a bio-lock on it? The only one who can gain access are Rassilon or Lord Braxiatel himself.”

The Doctor let one side of his mouth lift in a victorious smirk. He held up his sonic and let the blue light buzz a moment. “I’ve got one of these,” he said with cheer in his voice. 

Gruargin rolled his eyes. “Standard issue sonic disrupter,” he said with a sigh. “We all have one, there’s nothing special about that.”

The Doctor did his best to appear as not-offended-at-all as he could. He frowned a little and kissed the blue tip of the sonic as though assuring the inanimate device that it was indeed very special. “Well,” he drawled. “This one is.” 

“And why’s that?” she queried.

“Because it’s mine,” he answered with a smile and a lift in his brows. “There’s no other quite like this one.”

“I see…”

Despite the clearly suspicious tone in her voice and posture, the Doctor kept the smile on his face as he threw back a shoulder and strode toward the door in question. He gave it a once over and, on seeing the intricate circular engravings of his brother’s name in the polished metal, pressed the tip of the sonic into the entry pad. He held it a moment, grit his teeth as he counted off the seconds, then exhaled a breath of relief when the lock gave way and the door hissed open. “Oh yes!” he blustered happily. He then looked back at the guard with a smirk and flipped the sonic up to snatch it out of the air. “C.I.A. issue prototype. First of its kind. A universal lock picking system. A skeleton key. A magical device that gives each and every operative access to anywhere we want access to in the Capitol.”

He was through the door and had it sealed behind him before any one of the guards could try to formulate a response. He pretty much knew just what those responses just might be, and he spoke each one of them out loud as he took brief stock of the large cavern that was his brother’s former office. And cavernous it was. High ceilings with walls covered in the finest artwork he had ever seen, furniture that was handcrafted, antique and absolutely breathtaking in it’s beauty. Far too opulent and fancy for ….

…For anyone who wasn’t his brother. Of course, Brax’s office would look like a royal art gallery.

A bang on the door, and a demand from Gruargin for him to open the door and let them in, and the Doctor snapped quickly out of his appraising and awe filled look around the orrice.

“Right!” he chipped out with a loud clap of his hands. “Robot brain, desk drawer.” His brow creased in its very centre as he thought over those words and began to open each one of the ten drawers that Braxiatel’s desk had. “Why doesn’t it come as a complete surprise to me that he’d had a brain stashed somewhere in his desk?” He sniffed and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand as he moved from one side of the desk to the other. “Robot or not, it’s still incredibly morbid … unnerving … yet still not a surprise to me at all.”

The small chunk of electronics was finally located on top of a golden-rod manila envelope labeled: Expenses. He ignored the envelope and grabbed at the chunk of circuitry and wires that sat atop it. He blew into the circuitry and did a quick cursory eye-balled examination of it. It seemed intact, the stare of the wiring suggesting that it had been carefully removed from its body rather than torn free of it. Clearly, Brax had been quite careful in deactivating the K-9 unit, although just why, he wasn’t quite sure.

The banging on the door from the corridor shifted to a more urgent sound, and the Doctor quickly lifted his head to the sound. His breath exhaled hard to realise that his only available exit was probably now going to lead him into an entire archway of red-suited Chancellery Guards.

“Brilliant,” he muttered to himself as he pocketed the circuitry into a pocket of the robe and took a look around the office. “Brax,” he muttered to himself. “If I know you, and I like to think I do, then somewhere around here, you have to have an alternate exit strategy.” He wandered the walls and pressed his palm into the textured wallpaper in search of a depression, a button, a switch, anything.

He found nothing and took a step backward to survey the office layout. There was zero chance at all that Brax didn’t have an immediate escape route, and knowing him, it wouldn’t be something immediately obvious.

“Think, Doctor, Think!” he growled in order to himself. “What would Brax have that would unlock a secret door.” His lip curled at the continued banging on the door. He glared at it. “And if you would just stop that banging for a minute, then maybe I could figure it out!”

He stalked toward the desk and flopped down hard on the very edge of it. He thought nothing of what item he grabbed for on the desk behind him, but he snatched it up anyway. He continued to look around the room with his entire top lip lifted in a curl. He didn’t take note of the ball-shaped object in his hand as he tossed it from one hand to the other.

“Come on, Doctor. Think! What would Brax use to unlock it?” he pursed his lips and tossed the item from left to right. “It would be remote, of course. Having a tile or a switch is far too obvious, and no way would he put anything anywhere near one of his beloved works of art…”

He huffed and finally looked down in his hands, noting belatedly what it was that he was carelessly tossing left and right. A small smile formed across his face and he lifted the item high, seated atop the very tips of his fingers. A rounded resin shape that held within it a galaxy of swirls and colours.

It was something he’d made in an art module way back when he was in the academy. He must have been, oh, only about Sixty when he made this. It was one of his first – and one of his last – pieces of artwork he’d created before he left Gallifrey. A very intricate bit of telepathic mastery, even if he did say so himself. You only needed to hold the sphere up, send out a telepathic wave, and the colours and swirls would swim and morph and tell the story of just how Gallifrey was born from the explosion of a star gone supernova. 

“You sentimental old fool,” the Doctor breathed out with honest affection toward his brother. This must have been his very first acquisition … a Theta Sigma original. He couldn’t help but feel a little misty over that thought.

The Doctor couldn’t help it. He smiled and sent out his telepathic request to be shown the true beauty of his planet.

Movement pulsed and grew within the sphere, and as the story began to unfold there was a hiss from the back of the room. Any new affection and emotion he felt toward his brother and this sentimental item quickly fled upon realising that it had been the trigger needed to find escape. Of course he’d manipulate something like this as though it were nothing. What was once a brilliant bit of telepathic art was now little more than a pretty paperweight.

He exhaled with disappointment and popped the sphere into his pocket. With a determined stride, he walked toward the doorway, which opened up beside a gorgeous piece of Renaissance art from Earth. He narrowed eyes gaze as he neared it. Raphael Sanzio da Urbanino, if he wasn’t mistaken. And he rarely was mistaken about such things, particularly considering he’d spent quite some time in and out of the Renaissance era working with the artists of the time.

Admittedly, back in the early 1990’s, he’d taken off to engage in a jaunt to complete the Ninja Turtle circuit. 

Actually, he’d probably be best to _not_ admit that.

There was a shake in his head and a laugh in the very back of his throat as he walked through the doorway. The immediate switch from warmth and bright to dark and grungy was immediate. When the door hissed closed behind him, and humming fluorescent lights buzzed to life along the walls, he felt that change in a physical way.

Unlike the walls and the sense he felt within the catacomb corridors, however, this one seemed a lot more, how to put it, traversed. The catacombs felt like no one had wandered the hallways in centuries. These corridors felt, and smelled, as though it was a very recently travelled corridor. Dust had yet to settle, and it lacked the damp that came with an abandoned corridor.

He hummed with surprise at that. For what reason would Brax need to wander this corridor on a regular basis.

“ _I have a lab_ ,” he’d said to him earlier, before he sealed him within the catacombs. “ _Find it_.”

“A lab,” the Doctor repeated to himself. He nodded his head with increasing frequency as the possibility dawned on him. “I think I may have found it. Well, at least the way to find it, at any rate. Provided I don't bump into anyone or any … _thing_ … along the way, I might have just found it.”

He let out the smallest of whimpers. “Oh, I probably shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

He closed his eyes tight and lumbered on, half expecting something to materialise in his path to disrupt what seemed to be a pretty flawless trek right now. Actually. _Half expecting_ wasn’t entirely accurate, he fully and wholly expected it to happen, because he was the Doctor and things like that _always_ happened to him.

He looked around him and puckered put his lips. His voice shifted to a mere whisper. “Yeah. I really wish I hadn’t said that.”

The deeper into the corridor he moved, the more he felt that inner sense of dread warning him that this was moving far too easy. Even when the doorway at the end of the corridor came into clear focus, he still didn’t believe that this was going to remain a smooth and unhindered walk.

Face to face with the door, a tall and flat bit of metal with nary a fingerprint of a blemish on it, the Doctor determined that whatever it was that the universe has sent to stop him, it would probably be lurking beyond this door. He exhaled a long breath out through his lips and pressed his hand into an access panel at the side of the door. As it hissed and started to slide open, he held his breath and braced for whatever monster was waiting on the other side.

One of his eyes squinted shut, the other remained open. Obviously part of him was willing to see, meanwhile the other part of him was sending out a giant NOPE. As the doors slid open, however, any apprehension he held at all melted away, only to be replaced by the most intense sense of awe and wonder he had experienced this side of TARDIS doors.

“Oh. Oh. Oh, Brax,” he managed out breathily as he walked through the doors and took a look around one of the most impressive laboratories he’d ever seen in any one of his lives. He spun full circles as he strode forward into the room. His eyes were alight, his mouth gaped. “This is brilliant!”

A garbled and static-filled sound captured his attention, and the Doctor quickly snapped his head toward the sound. He lowered his head and turned his ear in an attempt to listen for the sound once more. It came again, this time with a little more urgency for attention. It seemed to call to him by name.

“Ma-a-ast-er…”

“I hear you,” he muttered quietly. “Where are you?”

It called to him again, the sound coming from a laboratory table against a wall. The Doctor caught sight of one of his oldest, and most dear friends, and found himself caught between elation and horror at what he saw.

K-9, his body rusted and dented, leaned against the wall. His middle section was open. Wiring and circuitry spilled out onto the table top. Most of it seemed carefully arranged and neatly tied, despite hanging out of his belly. Some of it, however, had been attached to larger cables that snaked across the floor to lead to a circuit conduit near the doorway, beside which stood another K-9 unit, this one flawless in body and structure, but with no life signs at all in it. His head was low and his eyes dark.

The Doctor clutched the small circuit board in his pocket. It was highly likely that the brain inside his pocket belonged to that particular unit. His eyes shifted to the crackling unit standing on the table at his side. This must be the one that Braxiatel had said he’d integrated into the Capitol networks.

“Two of you,” he murmured to himself with narrowed eyes as he switched his gaze between both robot dogs. “One of you must be Leela’s, the other Romana’s, am I right?”

The quiet one at the door didn’t move or react to his question. The one at his side grumbled and tried to speak with a voice that was nothing now except scratching, broken static.

“Well,” he said to himself as he pressed his hands into the tabletop and looked at the disembowelled K-9 in front of him. “I’m not exactly going to leave one of you here, now, am I?”

He drew his sonic screwdriver from his pocket, reached into the front of his robe to retrieve his glasses, and slipped them high onto the bridge of his nose. “So it looks like I have a little surgery to do, doesn’t it? The Doctor … is in.”


	81. Lies and Truths

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The CIA and Chancellery Guard arrive on Estrail

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was a chapter that wouldn't end. It went on and on my friend. One day I started writing it not knowing where I was ... and then I kept on writing it just because.... 
> 
> Damn it, now I'll be singing that song in my head for the rest of my life...... ugh.
> 
> This is all over the place, and I know it is. Estrail is chaos. and, then there was way more to get through than I had originally considered. We are nowhere near getting to the actual point of this.... But if I didn't end it right here and now, then I'd never do it.
> 
> But if you have questions, don't worry, Estrail isn't yet complete. There are a few bits and bobs that need addressing..... Conversely, if you think it's too much ... sorry! If you haven't worked out by now that I'm the long-winded type.... heh... 
> 
> I hope you enjoy.

~~oooOOOooo~~

A high-pitched and shrill scream pierced through the relative quiet of a mid-morning Estralian day. The shrill of the scream, and the doppler effect of it racing across the grasses and past their current position warned both Romana and Rose that the scream was not one of excitement or play. This was a scream of absolute terror.

“By the Gods,” Romana exhaled with worry. “What is that?”

Rose leaned forward in an equally concerned shift to run. “I’m more worried about just vwhich one of them it is.”

“Which one of the children?” Romana questioned incredulously. “How can you not tell that it’s your daughter who is screaming to the Gods for assistance?”

Rose broke into a jog and shook her head toward her. “It’s not that I can’t tell, Romana. It’s _that I don’t want_ it to be Ali who’s in _that_ level of distress right now.” She grabbed her hand as she shot ahead of her in the run. “Because with her uncle _and_ father off planet right now, it’s on us to temper whatever is ailing her.”

Romana winced. Alirra typically only responded to the males in the family when upset. When it was only Romana or Rose available for response, the child would fall more deeply into tantrum. “Heaven’s help us.”

“I have an emergency number for a temporally available Brax…. Do you think this qualifies for use?”

Romana gasped with shock and incredulity. “You have _what_?”

“Brax-Triple-Nine,” She panted in reply. “You don’t?

Romana snatched her hand to tug her into a faster run. “We’ll talk about that later. And depending on which of him you are able to reach, this likely would not qualify, only irritate him. None of us need an irritated Brax.”

“Yeah, been there, done that…”

They broke through the line of capsules and skidded in the soft red dirt of the clearing. Romana cupped her hand at her ear to properly pinpoint the ground zero point of the scream. With open fields broken by a line of trees, lines of Time Capsules, and an entire encampment of people milling about with their own brand of noise, it was difficult to immediately and accurately isolate the sound to find the young child.

Rose cupped both hands around her mouth and called out to her daughter. She was on her inhale to call out a second time when the sound of an angry snarl from the forests. That deep inhale stalled and then held hard inside her chest.

A breathy, “oh no”, sounded out from Romana at her side, and both women took a long stride backward as the heavy thump of large paws and claws echoed out from the treeline. Branches snapped, and fallen leaves were thrown as a large male Gallifreyan wolf exploded out into the clearing.

Soliarn landed in a low crouch a good twenty feet from where he shot airborne from the trees. He showed no reaction nor discomfort the bite on his fur from the young cub that lay draped over his shoulders, but there was fury inside the luminescent blue of his eyes. The darkening blue hue within his thick white coat pulsed as a warning to all not to interfere with whatever this animal had set himself to do.

The only one who dared do so, was Rose. She stepped forward with her hands held up to surrender.

“Sol…” she said in the best and most calm voice possible. “Soliarn, stand down!”

The large animal shot a hard look in her direction. His expression did start to soften, but only until a fresh scream sounded out from the near distance. It was a scream that was on fast approach. Soliarn dipped a shoulder to let his son plop safely on the ground, then bounded toward the young red-faced girl that was sprinting tearfully in their direction.

“Dadd-y-y-y-y-y-y!!” 

Behind Alirra, and amongst a small pack of Gallifreyan boys, Mark ran in fierce pursuit. He wore a bright smile of thrill and held a stick in his hand, at the end of which hung a large insect closely resembling a spider.

“It just wants to be your friend, Aly,” he called cheekily. “Come on, little sister, just say hello!”

Her eyes brightened with clear relief to see the white fur of the largest creature on Estrail running toward her defense. She threw open her arms and called out her protective wolf’s name, quickly throwing both arms around his thick neck. She sobbed against his fur as her face buried deep inside the soft pelt. 

A deep growl rumbled in the back of his throat as he prepared to deal with whomever it was that threatened the smallest female member of his pack. He rolled his shoulder to draw Alirra into safety behind him and lowered his head into a deep, threatening snarl. In front of him, Neroli planted his back feet and jumped from his front paws, yapping and barking angrily to the group of boys on approach.

Alirra remained behind the wolf’s shoulder. Her confidence in security was high, and she pointed toward her brother as his sprint shifted into a cautious walk. That stick and its damn spider still held outward.

“You go get him, Sol! Save me!!” she thrust her finger aggressively at her brother. “Eat him!”

Mark’s eyes were wide with panic that Soliarn just might take Alirra’s command and do just that. He could ignore Neroli and his incessant yapping, growling, and barking at his ankles, but Soliarn? No. Not at all. With the stick still in between his fingers, he held his hands up in surrender.

“I was just playin’, is all,” he managed out weakly. “Please don’t eat me.”

Soliarn thrust a large front paw forward to hook around his excited cub. With a huff, he pulled the young cub back into his chest, lightly knocked him atop the bead with his muzzle, then curled his large mass around Alirra. He lay down in that spot, allowing both his son, and Alirra to nestle safely in his fur. He gave a look to Mark, blinked, and closed his eyes as though to nap.

Rose and Romana did a side-step style walk around Soliarn.

“How you can so intimately trust these beasts like you do with your children, Rose, I will never understand,” Romana breathed out somewhat quietly, as though Soliarn hearing her question said trust might somehow result in _her_ being eaten.

“Sol’s more scared of Tiallu than he is any creature,” Rose murmured. “He so much as snorts derisively on one of the kids, and he’d be a dead wolf. The kids couldn’t be any safer with anyone than Tiallu and Sol.” She made it around the pile of white fur, wild brunette hair, and a bright red frilly sundress and turned to face her son. She set her hands on her hips and looked at the insect hanging from the stick by a thin line of web. “Mark. Just what is going through your head to make you think that chasing your sister around with a … with a …. With a. What is that thing?”

Gallifreyan language, broken by youth not possessing enough temporal knowledge to recite it in all its beauty, called out confidently from a taller child that stood at Mark’s rear. Rose stopped the young boy’s words with an upward snap of her finger. “I’m speaking to my son,” she reminded him. “And I therefore expect my son to answer me.” Her eyes shifted to Mark, who had by now folded his arms across his chest, keeping that stick in his grasp, but at a far enough distance so as not to end up having the creepy crawly start to crawl over him. 

“Look, Mum,” he managed out in a somewhat condescending tone. 

“Oh, don’t you talk down to me, young man,” she growled hotly. “You will show me some respect, am I understood?”

He lifted his head with a light pinch between his brows as the distant sound of materialising Time Capsule called out from the vortex. “Is that Tonza and Dad?”

“Oh, I hope so,” she half growled. She had to hold her hair back off her face as the winds of time buffeted the entire area. “Just wait until I tell the both of them how you were torturing your sister with this … you till haven’t told me what it is!”

Mark tried to answer the question, but his words were drowned out by the loud whining and wailing of not one, but a multitude of Gallifreyan Time Ships. Ships that were materialising all around them; each and every one of them bearing the large black and white insignia of the Celestial Intervention Agency.

Anger and reprimand immediately shifted toward panic and worry. Rose raised her voice to be heard over the cry of the ships. 

“Romana,” She called out. “Please tell me you called this lot, and that they’re not Rassilon thugs come to make trouble.”

Romana shook her head and quickly raced forward in an attempt to shield the children from a capsule materialising less than a foot away from them. “I did not, Rose. They’ve been sent from Gallifrey,” she yelled in response. “We’ve been discovered!”

Several loud, echo resounding thuds from each ship indicated the finality of materialisation.

“Then we need to find a way to protect them.” Despite the sounds of the ships was now silenced, Rose shouted her reply anyway to be heard over the creaking of opening doors. “Where’s Narvin when we need him … or her?”

“I am right here,” Narvin replied calmly as he stepped out of the ship that had materialised behind the children. 

Somewhat smug at catching Romana off guard, he took little notice of his forward path, striding forward with a very self-satisfied stride. He walked chest first into Mark’s stick, but merely brushed it off. He waved a hand toward the child when he tried to issue warning and strode to face Romana and folded his arms across his chest.

“These capsules,” he said with a lift in his chin as a gesture toward the fifty or so capsules that had materialised. “They’re all with me.”

Romana was definitely not pleased by the idea of so many Operatives of the CIA landing on her doorstep. “You brought the C.I.A. to Estrail?” she asked in a condescending and rhetorical manner. “The agency that is tasked with not only burning Braxiatel and the Doctor from the timestream, but operate on orders to apprehend Rose and return her to Gallifrey?”

He offered her a one-sided smirk. 

Romana didn’t like the smirk, and she certainly did not like the army of black and white uniformed Agents that filed out of the capsules. “Is this betrayal, Narvin?” she shot at him hotly. “Have you waited until our husbands have left our sides to betray us…” her voice shifted to a growl. “To betray _me_. Well let me assure you, _Narvin_ , that we will not be taken so easily. Bring all of the operatives you want to; Rose will _not_ be going anywhere. I will make sure of that.”

Narvin remained rather unaffected by Romana’s ire. He wore a smirk that was little more than a stretched press of his lips into thin line. He flicked a look toward Iannin, who approached quietly from across the grasses behind Romana and Rose, bringing with him the Doctor’s three former companions. He gestured toward him with a wave of his hand. “Ahhh. Operative Iannin. I see you’ve brought—” His words cut abruptly at a squeal of excitement from Rose.

“Jack!”

“Rosie!”

Narvin blustered with fluster and with light annoyance as Rose rushed by him with a squeak in the back of her throat and tears in her eyes. “Well, how incredibly rude,” he muttered indignantly with clear annoyance in his tone. He drew in a deep sniff and refocused his attention back onto Iannin. “Welcome to Estrail.”

Romana barely seemed to register the way Rose had taken off running. Her attention was far more focused upon the appearance of random C.I.A. operatives. “I don’t offer the same welcome,” she warned low. 

“My Lady President,” Iannin cooed with a low booming voice of respect; a tone not all that unlike Braxiatel’s smooth bass. He waited until Romana graced him with a polite nod for him to continue and offered a deep bow of respect. “I do beg of you to forgive the intrusion. While you might not welcome it now, in your future you feel quite differently about our presence here today.”

“I can’t see that I will ever be quite so eager for the presence of any member of the C.I.A.,” she drawled. At the light grunt over her shoulder from Narvin, she merely straightened her spine to a much prouder posture. “I do not react to guilt, Co-ordinator. Don’t expect that I will revise my words just to save _your_ feelings from being hurt.”

“Of course not,” Narvin muttered under his breath. He lifted his chin to look at the gathering of his future operatives, and the few red-suited higher-ranked Chancellery Guard members that his operatives had opted to drag along to face their Lady President. He then passed a glance toward Iannin. “Is there any specific reason that you’re bringing out the prisoners?”

“ _Prisoners_?” Romana barked out with clear horror in her tone. She took a single step toward the approaching operatives, then paused to look backward toward Narvin. “Oh no. No. I do _not_ approve of taking our people as prisoners; especially when they have done nothing wrong. Who approved this … this _abomination_?”

“These men and women were readying to arrest the coordinator and take him to Gallifrey,” Iannin answered in Narvin’s behalf. “Operatives of the C.I.A. stepped in to intervene –“

Romana grunted to interrupt his words. “Well, I hardly think your explanation adequately meets the criteria for their arrest and …” She narrowed her eyes at the operative. “ _Incarceration_.” She sniffed in deep, her lips falling into a displeased frown. “These men are only performing their job, acting on the orders of a superior.” Her eyes lifted to a particularly indignant looking guard. “Is this correct …. I’m sorry, what is your name?”

“You can refer to me as Commander,” he sneered in reply.

“Terkaikmathraendrie,” Iannin corrected as the operative holding Terkaik deliberately bumped shoulders with his prisoner in an unspoken demand for him to have more respect toward Romana. “Acting Commander of the Chancellery Guard. Loomed and trained as a cousin of the House of Redloom.”

“Redloom?” Romana queried with a smile and a very self satisfied tone inside the upper rise in the word. “Well. That is interesting.” Her eyes flicked to Iannin. “Older, or younger than Andred?”

“That’s Andredaselus to you,” Terkaik snarled. He drew in a deep breath to continue his line of thought that quite clearly contained an insult or three or four.

“If my Lady Romana wishes to refer to me as Andred,” Andred ground out with clear amusement in his voice from behind the pack. “Then who am I to correct her?” He cupped his hand heavily onto the shoulder of Terkaik. He held that hand down with the weight of his lean and squeezed tightly as he spoke again to him. “I see that you’re making friends and allies as usual, cousin.”

“Andred,” he said with a grunt and a wince in his eye at the tightness of the pinch. “We thought you were dead. You, and ….. and that…”

“Me, and my Savage, you mean?” he questioned smoothly. He hummed disapprovingly and released the hold of Terkaik’s shoulder to step forward toward Romana. “Very much alive, thank you,” he muttered without looking backward. He gave an exaggerated bow of greeting to Romana. “My lady.”

Romana pressed her lips together, biting on them, to prevent her smile from stretching. She knew what Andred was playing at with such an ostentatious display of respect, when typically he’d offer none. After a moment to control her smile, made more difficult with the surprised and even awed whispers of his name from many of the Guard, she licked at her lip. “Andred. I thought you were on the hunt this morning?”

“Hunt?” Terkaik scoffed indignantly. “You’ve become a _savage_ , like _her_?”

Romana flashed Terkaik a glare but shifted that glare toward Andred when he simply exhaled a short chuckle. “My Lady, the hunt today has been most successful.” He looked toward the medical capsule, to where his wife was leading a large grouping of limping, exhausted-looking Time Lords and ladies toward medical attention. He winced at the filthy, torn, and dishevelled look of them and turned to look back at Romana. “We had to bring back the group to get checked over by Phiroi. Not only is the transmat field from the time rings limited to fifteen travellers, twenty if we really want to push it, Leela didn’t feel comfortable having to protect so many converts in such weakened state while trying to hunt more.”

“I understand,” Romana interrupted with light humour in her tone. “Take some time to rest and recover.” 

Andred shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. We found an entire den of the infected. If we leave them too long, they may scatter.” He inhaled deeply through his nose. “I can’t lose them, Romana. These are our people.”

“I know, Andred,” she replied softly, full understanding and agreement in her tone. “And we will save every single one of them, no matter how long it takes.” She looked toward Soliarn with a soft smile that was met with a slow blink from the animal. “Would you like the wolf to assist?”

“A capsule would be better,” Andred replied with a roll of his shoulder and a wince of one cheek. He was clearly exhausted. “Preferably with at least one medic on board to assist.”

She nodded, her expression one of thought and planning. “I will have a word with Phiroi and see if he might be able to spare any of his staff. We have plenty of capsules available for use, although I would recommend taking a symbiotically linked Time Lord with you.”

Andred’s mouth stretched into a sad smile. “One recently released from his or her zombie state, I imagine you mean.”

Terkaik gasped with disgust. “What did you just say?”

Romana lifted her chin with clear indifference to the voice speaking just off to her left. “Are you still here, then?” She drew in a breath. “Narvin, just so we can finalise this rather unpleasant business, can you please state your intention in bringing these people to this planet? They’re clearly agents of Rassilon, and therefore have no place at all here with the resistance members.”

“You treasonous shrew,” Terkaik seethed through a spit. He glared toward Andred. “And you, Cousin. Formerly one of us; one of the most respected members of the Chancellery Guard; the leader of us all…”

“…And my leader still,” another of the guards cut in with a stretch in his spine and an attempt at a salute, made difficult with his hands tied together. “Revered Castellan that represented the very best of us.”

Andred brows seated his on his forehead as he looked first to the Guard speaking, and then across at others who were trying their best to offer salutes of their own with hands tethered together. His eyes shifted back toward the first. “I haven’t led the guard for centuries.”

Romana smiled just lightly. “But it certainly looks like you still could.” A bright expression of realisation lit up Romana’s face. “And what a mission to lead the men on: Rescuing our people from the disfiguring and mindless hold of the Dogma virus and bring them back home, as free men and women of Gallifrey.”

She heard murmurs from both C.I.A. Operatives and the Chancellery guard. Years of practice in the halls of the capitol had granted her the ability to be able to listen to several voices at once and understand them all. In this murmur she heard surprise, horror, and one or two voices of dissent. In general, however, it seemed that most of the men and women in red were ready to take up arms and follow Andred into whatever mission he was willing to lead them toward.

The voices of dissent shifted toward shock as they watched Leela lead a grouping of what appeared to be wounded and limping Time Lords and Ladies; their clothes filthy and rotted to tatters. Some wore ragged robes of council, others in the flowing and colourful dresses preferred by the women of the Capitol. There were rusted and dented armour of Chancellery Guard and battle uniform, as well as stained and torn C.I.A. uniforms. These people represented members from all tiers of Time Lord society. No one had been spared the wrath and indignity of this virus.

Horrified murmurs asking just what had happened swirled up from all men and women regardless of the colour of their uniform.

Romana took a step backward and opened an arm to gesture toward the group that were being herded toward Phiroi’s waiting medical capsule. She straightened her spine to a high and proud posture to address the entire group in one voice. “Take a look … a very long and hard look … a what your _President_ did to our people, to your fellow Gallifreyans.…” Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Leela stop the small procession with a light wave of her hand to keep them in full view of the spies and soldiers that filled the clearing. “These people - our brothers and sisters of time - were finally given freedom from the war that tortured us all. A war that decimated our lands and our peoples…”

She looked toward them, and then back to the group. She drew in a breath that lifted her shoulders high and heaved forward her bosom to further straighten her back. “They answered the call of our _President_ , who called upon them Answered the call to reach out across the universe to find ways of finding resources for us to move toward rebuilding our lands, our technology, and our people.” She paused to draw in a breath. “These people carried with them the hopes of all of us … The hopes of all … except for your Lord President Rassilon.”

His name drew out as a disgusted hiss. Romana clearly held no respect at for one of the founders of their entire society. 

No one in the gathering dared speak and interrupt her. Even Terkaik, his voice so hot and hostile toward her only moments ago, remained still and silent with eyes wide and filling with horrified tears.

Romana let her eyes shift across the gathering. Her voice, so strong and powerful, now shifted and softened with the perfect crack in tone to convey her heartsbreak. “But they didn’t get that chance. Instead of travelling to distant planets to secure what our people needed to help the recovery of Gallifrey, your fellow Time Lords and Ladies, and their loyal capsules, were captured inside an engineered transduction beam that was saturated with a highly infectious variant of the Dogma virus. They were held in an horrific, painful, and inescapable field of power until such time as that virus took hold.” Her eyes narrowed and her voice hardened. “And were then thrown toward this planet’s surface at terminal velocity …. And when I say terminal, I am not being deliberately melodramatic. Our people, our cousins, our brothers, sisters, our fellow Gallifreyans, were infected, and then thrown into the surface of this planet. Thrown in such a way as to ensure that they’d be forced to regenerate…”

Gasps let up from the gathering, and Romana knew that these were from Time Lords who had been alive during the original Dogma pandemic that nearly decimated Gallifrey. She nodded her head up and down in an exaggerated manner.

“I see that many of you are familiar with that virus, and what it does to a Time Lord when regeneration takes hold.” She drew in a deeper breath and held it a moment to hear the murmurs and mumbles become more angered and audible. “The story of why and how only gets much more painful and horrific. I will save you all from it, but say that it was at Rassilon’s design.”

“Are you sure of that?” Terkaik queried in a voice that was now broken and quiet. That’s a very dangerous accusation to make.

Romana nodded at him and gestured toward the small gathering of recovered Lords and Ladies beside Leela. “You need look no further than any of them for your answer, Guard of Redloom.”

One young Time Lord, a sandy-haired fellow with piercing brown eyes wearing tattered, torn, and rotted battle fatigues in the Cerulean colourway, staggered forward. It was clear to all that he was under the influence of regeneration illness, and that it took a great amount of energy simply to remain on his feet. He did so, however, with fierce determination. He lifted a hand to his forehead to attempt a salute to Romana. “My lady, I apologise for the interruption, however, if you need anyone to corroborate what you’re saying, then please allow me.”

Romana nodded and gestured for him to speak. “Please.”

He swayed in place, close to a stumble, but maintained a determined footing. “I was one of the first to crash here on Estrail,” he muttered after a hard swallow. “The war was over, and I was ready to return to my mate, my beloved, who was waiting for me on another planet.” He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. When they opened once more, they were full of fury. “But before Rassilon ould grant me my leave, I was tasked with one last thing to do for mother Gallifrey. A short supply run from the end of the Morophian system.”

“But that’s 500 million light years from here,” one of the CIA operatives exclaimed.

The young Lord nodded with a flick of his eyes toward her. “I’ve been piloting capsules across the universe for three incarnations. Five hundred years of careful and accurate navigation.” He drew in a long and deep breath that ended with a wince. “And yet, I barely finished dematerialisation off Gallifrey before my capsule was torn from the safety of the vortex. We were ripped from the vortex and thrown to the ground here on Estrail.” His face fell to show the agony of remembrance. “I don’t remember a lot about what came next, and the years I spent limping through the forests as a mindless zombie.” He sniffed. “But what I _do_ remember. What I will _never_ forget, was the final holographic message I received from Rassilon before regeneration, thanking me– his son of time – for my sacrifice to elevate the Time Lords to a position of ephemeral existence over the universe.”

Terkaik shot his cousin a sudden glare of question. “Andred. What does he mean by that?”

“Cousin,” he replied with a shudder. “You really don’t want me to get into that. Your hearts would not believe it.” The shudder eased with the touch of Leela as she slid her arm around his hip and leaned her head against his shoulder. His contented exhale at the touch of his wife belied the true gravity his revelations to the crowd. “But what this survivor says is the truth. Rassilon is sacrificing his own people for a deranged and selfish plan of elevating himself and a select few as Gods over the Universe.”

“It would be wise to listen to my husband, Time Lord,” Leela warned low, only willing to lift her head enough to look through her brows at Terkaik. “For it is Andred, and me, Braxiatel, and the Doctor who have seen the real damage that this Rassilon has caused to his people.”

Terkaik shot a look toward Andred. “And do you honestly expect me to listen to your Savage over the wisdom of our President?”

Andred lurched forward with a snarl on his lip and a growl in his chest. He was held back by the gentle touch of Leela’s hand on his chest.

“I may be a savage,” Leela replied coolly, and without any discernable emotion other than indifference. “But at least I am not a blind fool following the crazed words of a mad man.”

“Says the former companion of the Doctor,” he snapped in reply.

“Who is a wiser leader than your Rassilon would ever hope to be.”

Iannin cleared his throat. “It would be sensible to listen to the Savage as much as it is to listen to her mate, Commander. I can confirm the words of your former president, the Cerulean soldier, Castellan Andred, and her Lady Leela. What has occurred here on Estrail is an abomination worse than the creation of the Daleks themselves.”

“I suppose you’re going to validate that by citing yourself as a member of the C.I.A.,” he said with a sneer.

“Actually no, I’m not,” Iannin answered smoothly. He pulled lightly at the cuffs of his sleeves and rolled his shoulders backward as he cradled his hands ahead of him. “The history of Rassilon, and what occurred here on Estrail is common knowledge, and is included as an entire unit of study at the Academy … in _my_ time.”

Romana let out a displeased sound and tilted her shoulder to look down along it’s length at the man standing by her side. “Narvin….” She warned darkly.

“No need for admonishment, Romana,” he returned with an indignant sniff. “I wasn’t the one to sent them back in time … at least not _yet_.” He blinked his eyes slowly. “I imagine that the ongoing excitement of being able to berate my future self for such a travesty against the laws of time worthy enough to get your self nice and incandescent when the time comes for you to unleash it all.” His voice flattened out smooth. “I can hardly wait.”

Iannin’s brow flicked upward and there was a light measure of amusement on his face at the exchange between Narvin and his Lady President. He shifted his gaze to Terkaik. “All of the Operatives you see today … we are all from three hundred years in your future. Sent back as a necessary force of intelligence…” He paused at a lough and sharp laugh of contempt from Phiroi at the rear of the pack. “Err…”

Phiroi’s head slowly shook as he walked unashamedly through the crowd rather than around it. In his arms was a small child no older than 12 months of age. His eyes were deep and rimmed with black and red, his face gaunt from tiredness. “It has been my experience that the word _intelligence_ belongs several solar systems away from the initials C.I.A.”

Narvin lifted his head and rolled his eyes so far upward he was at risk of permanent blindness. “Oh, _please_.”

Phiroi barely spared him a glance. He instead lifted the small girl up underneath her arms and thrust her toward Romana. “Here, please take your child. I am a doctor, not a child-minding service.”

Romana shifted her hands underneath Clara’s tiny bottom and across her back to safely and tenderly take the child into her arms. She gave a small welcoming coo toward the little girl before she looked back up at him. “My apology, Phiroi. How is she?"

He stroked Clara's hair with one stroke of the flat of his hand. "Just a cough, possibly caught what the humans call a cold from one of Rose's children. My observation of her condition over the last hour has yielded nothing of note that would indicate serious illness on a Gallifreyan child. I would say you have nothing to be too concerned about. Of course, bring her back if she worsens." He paused thaen flicked up a finger. "And I mean _worsen_ in a legitimately alarming manner, not just because Braxiatel is in a fret because she sneezed."

She nodded and pulled the child close, tucking her head underneath her chin. "Again, thank you. I understand that you are very busy right now…”

“Busy is an understatement,” he returned tiredly. “We have more recovered Time Lords and Ladies arriving by the hour. I am nearing war-time numbers, my lady, and need more assistance if I am to adequately attend to and ensure that booster inoculations are administered well within effective time parameters.” He sniffed. “I don’t need anyone here reinfected.”

She nodded with a firm expression marring her features. “I agree. “I will have Carein locate your former staff members and have them report to your capsule.”

“In the meantime, if it is permissible, I will need to request Rose’s assistance.”

“It is.”

“Good, she can assist with inoculating the recovered. I’ll also need her to handle the intake, and perhaps…” He pressed the butts of his palms to her eyes. “Omega help us, it’s too much for her as well.”

“Rose will do what she can,” Romana said confidently. “Which will be more than enough help to you right now. I will have more staff sent to your capsule as soon as I’ve dealt with my current quandary if that is alright with you.”

“If I must,” he muttered dryly. He turned back to the crowd, his intention to find Rose to have her return to the capsule with him. He paused just shy of a full 180 to look at something on Narvin’s shoulder. His brow lifted just slightly and he hummed a curious sound.

“What?” Narvin asked with a moan.

“Oh, just wondering when it was that you got over your fear of spiders.”

Narvin’s expression didn’t quite fall to something that was worried, although the light glint in his eyes suggested he was trying very hard to make sure that it didn’t. “Why are you asking me that?”

He gestured toward Narvin’s shoulder. “Because of the rather large one you have walking up your sleeve….” 

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: No, I do not own Doctor Who or any of the recognisable characters within this fic. I'm just playing in their sandpit for a wee while...


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